Parliament is back in session – that means that TheyWorkForYou.com will be filling up with lots of new content as our representatives come back to work and start on the rounds of debates, committees, and written answers.

How do you keep up with the stuff that’s relevant to you? Well, you could read it all, every day – or you could be smart, and set up a topic alert.

Receive an alert every time your chosen word or phrase is mentioned

If you’re interested in a specific topic, and you’d like to receive an email every time someone mentions it in Parliament, follow these steps.

1. Search for your chosen topic

Let’s say you’re particularly interested in badger culling, and you’d like to receive an alert every time the word ‘badger’ is mentioned in Parliament.

i) Enter your search term on the homepage:

Tip: If your chosen search term has more than one word, you may find it useful to put it inside quotation marks – otherwise you will receive alerts every time both words are mentioned, even if they are not mentioned adjacently.

ii) Click ‘search’, and you will be taken to a page of search results for your term:

TheyWorkForYou uses ‘stemming’ – so these results contain mentions of words such as ‘badgers’ and ‘badgering’: again, if I want to only receive mentions of the word badger, and none of its derivatives, I should put the word in quotation marks.

iii) Click on the large blue link to the right of the page: “Subscribe to an email alert for [your search term]”.

iv) If you are logged in to the site, that’s it – you’ve subscribed, and you don’t need to do anything more.

If you are not logged in, don’t worry. You don’t need an account in order to sign up for alerts.

Input your email address, and click on the ‘subscribe’ button (NB not the ‘search’ button, but the higher up button marked ‘subscribe’):

We’ll send you a confirmation email.

Click on the link in the email, and there you go – you’re subscribed.

You can sign up for as many alerts as you like: if you are interested in many topics, it is probably worth registering, as you then do not have to go to the bother of inputting your email address and clicking the confirmation link for each one.

In our next post, we will look at how to manage your alerts, and common mistakes that can be made setting them up.

Prefer to receive alerts every time a specified MP speaks? See our previous post.

Image: Lorenzoclick (CC)