Monitor Legislation Tracker - DeHavilland

This guide gives an overview of the different features of the DeHavilland EU website. For any questions, or for a demonstration, please contact your Policy Analyst. Monitor | Legislation Tracker | PeoplePoint | Forward Planner | Search | Political Research

Monitor DeHavilland uploads several thousand news items every day, which are tagged by our system based on the content. This allows them to be sorted into streams based on specific topics, which can be viewed in the Monitor tab.

There should be several such streams on the left-hand side of the page – these can be easily updated or created by your Policy Analyst to cover any topics of interest. You can also create your own streams using the Search tab (see below). Each stream contains items on the chosen topics – this includes press releases from the EU institutions and stakeholder, questions from MEPs, tweets from Commissioners, or speeches, for example. By default, the content is from the last 24 hours, but the date range can be changed to go back for years.

Legislation Tracker The Legislation Tracker is a database of all ongoing legislative proposals. On the landing page, you can find proposals either by using the search bar, or the menus on the left-hand side, which sort proposals by policy area, and then by Commission DG. You can also see any dossiers that you have recently viewed, or that you have added as a favourite.

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For each dossier in the Tracker, there are three tabs: Quick Reference, Summary of Stages, and Press Releases. 

Quick Reference gives the basic information on the proposal: a link to the original text, a very brief explanation of what it is about, and where it is in the legislative process, indicating last and next steps. It also lists the Rapporteur and Shadow Rapporteurs in the Parliament, linking to DeHavilland profiles. Finally there is a history of the proposal with all the stages of the legislative process. This includes any future dates (which are of course provisional).

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Summary of Stages provides a more in depth history of the proposal, including links to documents such as EP amendments, or Presidency compromise texts. It also includes short summaries of items such as debates in EP Committees. Again any future dates are included.

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Press Releases provides a stream of news items from our database that are related to the proposal. Typically this consists of stakeholder press releases or parliamentary questions.

Finally, from the Quick Reference tab, the information on any proposal can be downloaded into a Word document with the button in the top right of the screen.

PeoplePoint PeoplePoint is DeHavilland's database of politicians and officials. Again, profiles can be searched for at the top of the page, or accessed via the menus on the left-hand side. Profiles For every person on PeoplePoint there will be, as a minimum, an email address and phone number. For more high-profile figures, there will be more information, possibly including a biography written by our editorial team.



The profile of Roberto Gualtieri MEP above has such a biography, as well as personal details and contact details for MEP assistants. The Committee and Delegation membership for all MEPs can be found under the "Current Activities" tab. Contact Management The more sophisticated side of PeoplePoint is the contact management function. If you navigate, for example, to the ECON Committee, using the menu on the left, there is a link to 'Contact Politicians' at the top of the list.

If you click this, you will see the same list of MEPs in a different format, with three options at the top: Export to Excel, Email Merge, and Add to Group. 

Export to Excel allows you to download information on selected people into a spreadsheet. For example you might want a list of all ECON MEPs' emails and phone numbers.

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Email Merge takes you to a new screen where you can enter text to email to the selected people. The email will appear to have come from whatever email address is logged into the system – there will be no mention of DeHavilland. There is also an option to send yourself a test email in the bottom right corner. The system will log your activity so that you can always check what you have sent, and to whom.

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Add to Group allows you to create and save your own groups of contacts. For instance you could create a group of MEPs from several Committees, or of combined Commission officials and MEPs. Any groups created will be visible to anyone in your organisation.

Forward Planner The Forward Planner is a database of events, ranging from political group events in the European Parliament to Council Working Party meetings. Events can be filtered by type, data, and issue. For instance, you could search for all stakeholder events on financial regulation in November, or see which Parliament Committees are meeting in the next week. There is also a keyword search. When you have run a search, you can then download the results into a Word document to give a much more readable format. When downloaded, the results can be sorted either by day or by category, depending on whether the box is ticked.


Search As with Monitor, Search is a means of accessing our comprehensive database of news items. In the top left of the screen there are two options: Search and Advanced Search. Search functions as a simple keyword search, using quotation marks for complete phrases. So a search for "data protection" would bring back all the items on the system that contain this phrase. This includes such things as parliamentary questions, Commissioners' speeches, and stakeholder press releases.


When the search has run, it will sort content by relevance, but you can also change this to sort by date, which may be more useful. By default the search goes back one month, but the date range can be changed to go back for several years, or for a specific period.

Searches can be saved in the top right corner, either in Search, or in Monitor, so they can be easily accessed later. Advanced Search is a more sophisticated tool. Clicking on 'Political Issues' allows you to view the codes used by the DeHavilland system to tag items. Note that financial issues can be found under Treasury. It is then possible to filter by other criteria, such as the type of item (press release, question, speech, etc.). As an example, we will search for MEPs' questions on banking union.


When you hit Search at the bottom of the screen, you will be taken to the regular Search page, where again you can adjust the date.

Political Research The Political Research tab is very simple – it is a platform for several of DeHavilland EU's more general briefings. You can find content such as calendars, lists of political group coordinators, and briefings on the Council Presidency.
