MAPLE Leaves Nothing to the Imagination

For all those who have wondered who really has influence in the Bay State, there's now a new tool...

MAPLE has launched Lobbying Explorer, a free database showing who has lobbied on Massachusetts bills, on whose behalf, and what positions were taken. Pulling in every lobbyist disclosure filed since 2010, it covers thousands of Massachusetts clients and lobbyists, their activity on tens of thousands of bills, and $1.2 billion in reported lobbying compensation. MAPLE (the Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement) is a free public platform that helps users track legislation, submit and read legislative testimony, and access transcripts of legislative hearings.

“The Secretary of State’s office offers a search tool, but you can only open and read one disclosure at a time. We built Lobbying Explorer by opening and organizing all 56,202 of them for you into a free database,” said Matthew Victor, Executive Director of Digital Civic Infrastructure at Partners In Democracy and Co-Founder of MAPLE. “We’re excited to add this new tool to MAPLE to help people better understand what their government is doing, how it impacts their lives, and how to take civic action.”

Massachusetts requires lobbyists and their clients to report, twice a year, which bills they worked on and what was paid. That information is public, but in its raw form it is hard to use. Answering a basic question like “who lobbied on this bill?” can mean reading through many separate filings. Lobbying Explorer is built for the reporters, advocates, community groups, researchers, and residents who want that answer quickly.

Access to timely, comprehensive, and actionable legislative information is essential for a healthy democracy, yet this information is often difficult for the public to access. Grassroots organizations, neighborhood groups, youth organizers, and advocacy coalitions often struggle to track bills, coordinate testimony, and respond quickly to policy developments. On the other side, legislators themselves lack modern tools to understand the will and knowledge of their constituents, with input fragmented across emails, hearings, lobbyists, and social media.

"Lobbying is a legal and legitimate part of how laws get made, and our job is to make the public record of it usable. Social media gives people hot takes on a bill. We’re building a platform that gives them the facts and the context: who lobbied on it, who testified, and what was said at the hearing,” said Nathan Sanders, Co-Founder of MAPLE.

MAPLE’s tools, all freely available to the public, allow users to:

• Access the full text and AI-generated summaries for every bill introduced in the past five years; filter and sort the thousands of introduced bills using AI-generated keywords and advanced sorting criteria.
• Add testimony to MAPLE’s bill pages, either as an individual or an organization, supporting users in delivering testimony to committee chairs and their own legislators.
• Track bills and other users, and receive updates as a bill moves through the legislature or when a user adds new testimony.
• Read and search AI-generated transcripts of legislative hearings.

MAPLE’s Lobbying Explorer is available at MapleTestimony.org/Lobbying.