“Time is our most expensive asset”
Timing, format and content: how ÉTICA Inteligência Política built, with Sigalei, a government-relations operation over seven years.
What this case shows
A mid-sized government-relations consultancy, with clients from very different sectors, built over seven years a weekly operation in which timing, format and content — the tripod Ética upholds internally — all fit into the same day.
This case shows how Sigalei entered that operation in 2018, how Ética's method shaped the product over time, how that helped the technical team, and what became possible in the relationship with the end client.
A political consultancy serving everyone from streaming to aviation
ÉTICA Inteligência Política is an institutional and government-relations consultancy headquartered in Brasília. With a team of 15 professionals, it serves clients ranging from aviation to NGOs, spanning energy, law, associations and federal councils. Its focus is on mid-sized and large organizations.
Ética's work is the midfield between clients and political decision-makers.
The operation involves mapping stakeholders, identifying who supports or opposes each client's agenda, structuring contacts, creating strategies and opportunities to defend those interests and — for all of that to happen, at the base of everything — meticulously monitoring what goes on in the federal Legislative and Executive branches.
As Amanda Rhodes, the consultancy's administrative manager, sums it up:
“We are in the market to defend our clients' interests before political decision-makers. We act as a strategic link between the private sector and public authorities, taking clients' agendas to the National Congress and the Executive and translating the political and legislative environment into information, guidance and opportunities for their organizations.”
The volume gives the measure of the operation. Some clients have more than three thousand bills monitored. On average, each client has between 1,500 and 2,000 bills. All fifteen team members use the platform. “Administration is the area that uses it least, but even so it uses it,” Amanda jokes. “Our team uses SIGA a lot.”
Asked what Sigalei helped her achieve within her management area, she answers directly:
“Time. Today, one of the most valuable resources is time, and it is increasingly scarce for everyone.”
This case is about what Ética does with that time.
How the week begins
Amanda describes the routine like a map: Ética starts using Sigalei on Monday and stops on Friday.
On Monday morning, the team opens the week's legislative agenda in Sigalei, covering the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Everything that entered Congress's agenda shows up there — both what Ética tracks and what it doesn't.
It is a deliberate decision to open the entire agenda, not just the filter of bills already flagged. “Because there's a risk that some piece of information slips by, we consult the SIGA agenda to have a complete view of everything that entered Congress,” Amanda explains.
The agenda is divided by committee. Each consultant, trainee and intern takes on a set and reads their part: deliberations, bills on the agenda, events, public hearings. As they read, they flag what is of interest to each client.
Once that stage is done, the platform generates each client's personalized legislative agenda, already formatted with Ética's letterhead, colors, fonts and logo. It's up to the team to make the week's highlights: what goes up into the body of the email sent to the client, so that they “don't have to open the document and read the whole thing.”
On Tuesday and Wednesday the routine repeats, because Congress doesn't release everything on Monday. Committees and plenaries publish their agendas throughout the week, and Ética makes agenda add-ons so nothing slips through.
In parallel, throughout the days, the pushes arrive: updates on the bills Ética tracks for clients — such as rapporteur assignment, opinion submission, addition to or removal from the agenda, and so on.
They arrive in a WhatsApp group, updated every fifteen minutes. The trainees read them, separate what is genuinely relevant, and forward it to the consultancy's general group, where the consultants add editorial treatment, next steps and behind-the-scenes information before sending it to the end client.
Friday closes the week with the legislative summary: what happened, what advanced, what remained pending.
Wislas Sousa, team coordinator and consultant at Ética, sums up the operational gain of this routine pragmatically, comparing it with what he himself lived through as an intern:
“I used to spend an entire shift — a morning into the early afternoon — formatting the information, back when there were many clients and the team was small. With the pre-formatting, the time dropped to about an hour, letting the team just review and focus on the content.”
The tripod: timing, format and content
What gives Ética's work its philosophical backbone is a tripod that Amanda describes as something the consultancy upholds for every team member:
“Our work rests on three pillars: timing, format and content. At some moments we need to bring all three together; at others, the priority is just one or two of them. When timing is decisive, WhatsApp becomes an essential tool to ensure agility in communication.”
Choosing WhatsApp as the main channel for the daily pushes is strategic. Amanda explains, thinking of the end client: “The executive, the company owner, is in an Uber, or on a shuttle flight, and can quickly open their phone and read it.”
On the other side of the relationship, Wislas explains, thinking of the consultant in the field:
“From Tuesday to Thursday, consultants spend the day running around Congress, in meetings and following hearings. Since they do everything on their phones, receiving the information and resolving it right there over WhatsApp is far more practical than having to open the platform on the phone and organize the information from scratch.”
What concretely changed
The most concrete saving Amanda perceives is time. A document like the legislative agenda, done by hand in earlier versions of the operation, used to take about five hours: gathering information from various portals, building spreadsheets, formatting each message for each client. Today, the same work takes around half an hour, counting the time for critical analysis on top of what the platform already delivers pre-formatted.
Another leap came in the pace of the pushes. Before, Ética managed to deliver one push per day to clients. Today it delivers two: one in the morning, another in the late afternoon. Not because the team grew, but because Sigalei lets the curation fit into both windows.
A less visible gain, but perhaps the most structural, is the elimination of an entire category of error: errors in bill numbers, in summaries and in bills swapped between clients — typical of high-volume manual operation — stopped happening.
“Because SIGA collects the information directly from the official websites of the Legislative Houses, the possibility of error is restricted to the source itself. Beyond that, automation reduced operational failures that used to occur given the large volume of data, such as adding a bill to the wrong client's agenda. That doesn't happen anymore.”
When an error does appear, it is traceable: “only if there was some error in filling in the information at the official source — then it's a human failure, not a tool error.”
Wislas confirms the gain from a team manager's angle. The demands on the team become less operational and more qualitative. “We can check in a centralized way on the platform whether the information they send is correct and reliable. That helps a lot with monitoring and verifying the messages.”
The operation also became less fragile in the face of the turnover typical of government-relations consultancies, a theme Wislas also raised: “Our market has very high turnover, not only of interns but of trainees and sometimes even consultants.”
With the clients' history centralized on the platform, one person leaving doesn't mean losing the knowledge. Amanda explains: “That history is ours. It's there in SIGA. The consultant has their own account; if they leave, we can block and cancel the account and they no longer have access. That history stays with us.”
For the arriving consultant, the history itself becomes training material. “With SIGA, we can guide the consultant to access a given client and see, in an organized way, all the bills being monitored. That lets a relevant part of the training and of getting familiar with the portfolio be done directly on the platform.”
What the time frees up
The time gain, put like that, could sound like a saving. Amanda describes it as redistribution: the team stops spending hours on formatting and collection and starts spending hours on analysis.
“My team is made up of highly technical and qualified professionals. With SIGA, we can concentrate information and processes in a single tool, letting these people devote their knowledge to more strategic activities that generate more results, instead of wasting time on manual tasks.”
Amanda says: “I can gather and organize all this information clearly for the client, showing the scale of the work done. From a management standpoint, that lets us present quantitative results and demonstrate, more objectively, the value of what we do.”
Management itself also changes. Amanda describes how she divides and follows the weekly activities on the platform: who read which committees, whether new bills came in between Monday and Tuesday, whether the agendas were generated and sent on time.
“We also use a control spreadsheet that records the committees already analyzed and the number of bills identified in each. So if one day there were 30 bills and the next day 43 appear, SIGA lets us quickly identify the new additions, without having to redo the whole reading.”
There's an even finer shift — moving from firefighting to the anticipatory. Amanda confirms it. With the week's agenda visible as early as Monday, the consultant can map high-interest bills that entered for deliberation, assess the impact on each client, and define an action plan.
“With the information SIGA collects at the start of the week, we can quickly alert the client to a high-impact bill being placed on the agenda and structure the strategy of action. From there, we assess the most suitable measures, such as talking to the rapporteur, seeking removal from the agenda, or working toward rejection of the matter.”
Less stress, more analysis, more strategy. The Sigalei team's direct question — “And what about stress? How does Sigalei help you there?” — got an objective answer: “Definitely, the team works more calmly and with less stress, because it now has more time to carry out the activities with quality.”
The end client feels it too
An important sign of the quality of this operation comes from outside Ética: from the end client. The consultancy recently ran a climate survey with its base, and Amanda reports what she heard:
“Some clients highlighted that two products built with SIGA's support are especially useful day to day: the Agenda Legislativa, which organizes priorities at the start of the week, and the Resumo Legislativo, which consolidates the main events at the end of it.”
The Agenda becomes, in Amanda's description, the document the client's parliamentary advisor relies on all week. It's what they use to talk to directors, present what's happening, align the team's activities. “The longest-standing clients evolved with us. Those who have been with us since 2018 saw every evolution, both in our products and in our deliverables.”
On the prospective side, having Sigalei as part of the operation is also a commercial asset. When Ética prospects a new client, it presents the platform as part of the delivery. “It creates confidence for the client, because they know we have a tool that helps collect, organize and deliver all this information.”
Made by a consultancy, for consultancies
What perhaps most sets this case apart from any other technology-adoption story is that Ética was not a client that adapted to a tool. It was a client that helped shape it, because it was one of Sigalei's first clients — and it grew alongside it.
Amanda articulates this clearly:
“Because we were one of SIGA's first clients, we ended up evolving together with the tool. Whenever a new need came up, we shared it with the team, and they looked for a solution. We really liked that openness to listen, and that's exactly why we've stayed with SIGA to this day.”
Wislas, who had used Sigalei at other companies before joining Ética and had also used other monitoring platforms on the market, offers a counterpoint that helps measure the effect of that co-creation:
“The other platforms I used were basically consultation databases. They even sent some email alerts, but it all turned into spam because they weren't personalized for our routine. In the end, we just clicked to mark them as read and nobody took any action.”
Sigalei, in Ética's case, operates inside the routine, not alongside it. Amanda turns that observation into a frank recommendation for peers in the sector:
“When I recommend SIGA, I always say the tool grew together with us. Because it was developed by people who know the routine of a consultancy, it presents information in a clearer, more practical way. When another consultancy asks me whether it's worth hiring, I say yes — including because we had the chance to contribute to improving the platform.”
The journey continues
At Ética, two frontiers are still under construction.
The first is tracking the Executive branch, especially reading the federal and subnational Official Gazettes. What Ética needs is a layer of intelligence — being refined by Sigalei — that understands sector context and priorities. Today, Ética still does this work manually.
The second is the exploration of the artificial-intelligence agents that Sigalei has been deploying in the base. Amanda comments: “We're still learning to use this AI part of SIGA. It's something new.” Some agents already operate almost invisibly in the routine: the automated generation of the week's agenda and summary with Ética's and the clients' letterhead and colors is one of them.
Others are still being introduced, like SigaBot, a tool capable of reading the team's own WhatsApp conversations and organizing them on the platform.
Methodological note. This case was built from in-depth interviews with Amanda Rhodes (administrative manager of ÉTICA Inteligência Política) and Wislas Sousa (team coordinator and consultant), conducted in 2026 by Conversion Lab, with the participation of Graciele Santos and Frederico Oliveira, from Sigalei, in the initial contextualization stage. Metrics and quotes were validated with both companies before publication.
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