A Clearer Picture: Why Shared Lobbyist Registries Work
When municipalities consider a lobbyist registry, they often think of it as a local tool: a way for residents to see who is lobbying their council, on what topics, and…
When municipalities explore the idea of creating a lobbyist registry, one common question arises: Should we build it ourselves, or should we use a purpose-built solution like Lobby Registry?
On the surface, building a registry in-house may seem appealing. After all, your IT team knows your systems, and it might look like a way to save costs. But in practice, in-house builds almost always result in one of two outcomes: a high-cost, high-maintenance project that takes months to get off the ground, or a glorified spreadsheet that technically checks the box but provides little real value to constituents.
Lobby Registry was created to solve these exact challenges. Here’s why municipalities shouldn’t build in-house — and why Lobby Registry is the smarter choice.
Lobbying doesn’t stop at the city line. Lobby Registry connects municipalities into a shared system while still giving each community its own branded, customizable registry. That means constituents, journalists, and officials can not only see who is lobbying in their municipality, but also gain context by seeing activities across neighboring communities.
An in-house build cannot replicate that shared ecosystem.
Building in-house means: gathering requirements, designing, coding, testing, debugging, hosting, maintaining, upgrading, and supporting. It’s a long process with high IT overhead — and once it’s launched, the ongoing management never goes away.
With Lobby Registry, municipalities are up and running in days, not months. There is no IT burden, no custom hosting, and no patching or maintenance for staff to worry about. It is turnkey by design.
Too often, in-house registries end up as little more than spreadsheets made public online. While this technically “provides” a registry, it doesn’t provide transparency. These spreadsheets are clunky, hard to search, and don’t give constituents meaningful insight into lobbying activity.
Lobby Registry is a fully functioning, purpose-built system.
It’s not just a check-the-box registry — it’s a usable governance tool.
Building in-house is rarely cheaper. Staff time, IT resources, servers, upgrades, and ongoing maintenance costs quickly add up. And when staff change, knowledge is often lost, leading to higher costs later to keep the system running.
With Lobby Registry, the cost is clear, predictable, and affordable. A flat annual fee covers everything — unlimited use, full features, and support — with no surprises.
Lobby Registry was designed specifically for Canadian municipalities, not as a one-size-fits-all platform. It supports municipal rules, workflows, and terminology out of the box. Each registry can be white-labeled with your branding, customized with your own council and staff lists, and tailored to your municipality’s unique needs.
Building internally means reinventing the wheel — and often missing the features that truly make a registry useful.
Municipalities that use Lobby Registry benefit from lessons learned across other implementations. Instead of building from scratch and hoping it works, municipalities can rely on a platform already tested, proven, and adopted by peers.
When municipalities build in-house, they either end up with spiraling IT costs or with a barebones registry that does little more than check a box. Lobby Registry provides a better path forward: a turnkey, shared, purpose-built system that is affordable, easy to use, and designed to deliver real transparency and accountability.
Don’t settle for a glorified spreadsheet. With Lobby Registry, you get the complete picture.
Lobby Registry is a consumer-facing web app owned and built by
J-SAS Inc.
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