Damola [00:00:00]: The Chamber leaders that exercise that level of like, hey, let’s bring everybody to the table, regardless of the dues that they’re paying and treating as many stakeholders as possible as true equals so that they’re in a position to be able to work together and really be able to advocate for the policies that they think are in the best interest of as many stakeholders as possible, is what I’ve seen great Chamber leaders effectively do.

 

Amanda [00:00:29]: That’s the voice of Damola Ogundipe, founder and CEO of Plural, a public policy intelligence platform that helps Chambers track, monitor, and collaborate on legislation and advocacy work. Damola shares about the unique power of Chambers to influence and shape policy. Where to start if you’re new to policy, responsibilities and everyone’s favorite topic these days, the impact of AI. I’m Amanda Ellis and you’re listening to Inside America’s Best Cities, a podcast for Chamber economic development and talent attraction professionals. Before we get into this episode, a quick word from our sponsor: Young, Smart, and Local. Looking to grow your talent attraction knowledge and visit one of everyone’s favorite cities? Check out Young, Smart, and Local November 13 through the 15th in New Orleans. This three-day conference is for leaders like you from economic development and community organizations. You’ll delve into best practices around town, attraction, growth, and retention alongside other experts. November 13 through the 15th in New Orleans. Learn more and register today at youngsmartandlocal.com. And with that, let’s jump in. Damola, welcome to Inside America’s Best Cities. We are super excited to have you and hear about your company, Plural. Welcome.

 

Damola [00:01:44]: Thanks for having me, Amanda.

 

Amanda [00:01:46]: To kick us off, can you just give us an overview? What is plural? And I believe you had a semi recent name change, so maybe cover that and how you help Chambers.

 

Damola [00:01:55]: Yeah, so, Plural, we were formerly known as Civic Eagle, now Plural. So, we’re a policy intelligence platform. We help organizations like Chambers track, monitor, and collaborate on legislation and regulations at the federal and state level here in the US. But also in some international jurisdictions, Nigeria and South Africa.

 

Amanda [00:02:13]: Tell us also just a little bit about you, like what you did before you started this, how that led you to this and informs your work. Just some background there.

 

Damola [00:02:22]: Yeah, so I was a management consultant right out of undergrad. So, I went to the University of Minnesota. I got my degree in Finance as well as African American Studies and then also Entrepreneurship. So, I double minored and had one major. And then right after I graduated, moved out to LA and started working as a management consultant for a firm called Oxford Health. And that was great. I mean, I was, like I said, grew up in Minnesota, I went to University of Minnesota. So the change in climate was welcomed.

 

Amanda [00:02:45]: I bet.

 

Damola [00:02:46]: Started working as a management consultant in the healthcare space for, like I said, Oxford Health that was focused on helping healthcare institutions and healthcare systems transition from older school technologies focused on more advanced, more modern EMRs platforms like Epic, McKesson, Cerner. I would help with that digital transformation within these health systems, but then also help them with regulatory affairs, right? Keeping track of what were the new regulatory changes happening in the healthcare space as it pertained to digital transformations within healthcare institutions. And that’s where I kind of picked up the interest and the knack for keeping track of regulations. Right. I got paid a good amount of money as a consultant to do a lot of manual work and manual collation and reporting on healthcare policy and healthcare regulations. And I just thought that there might be a better way using technology to be able to do that work.

 

Amanda [00:03:45]: So that led you to create it and then figure out what types of organizations that was applicable to?

 

Damola [00:03:50]: Exactly. So initially, I kind of extended the work that I was doing to like, hey, how do other types of organizations do this, right? My thought process at the time was getting paid as a consultant to manually collect information for these really massive healthcare systems. I thought, how do companies do this? How do nonprofits do it? Because they’re obviously working a lot in the policy space. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that, trying to figure out, is there a better way to do this? And I ended up zoning in on the nonprofit space at first. That’s what caught my attention when I was looking at it from a social interest perspective, right? If me and the consulting firm that I was working with were getting paid to kind of do some manual labor around this, how could a nonprofit possibly afford to do it right, with limited resources at their disposal? And that’s kind of where I honed in on was thinking about the challenges that a nonprofit would face when it comes to advocating for policy, particularly things that have had an impact. So I just kind of zoned in on that and started working my way through thinking about what a solution would look like. And then that obviously expanded into, all right, this could be a solution for nonprofits, this could be a solution for Chambers, this could be a solution for corporations. The market opportunity ended up expanding as I dug deeper into the opportunity.

 

Amanda [00:05:09]: So, I know you work with several, as we’ve mentioned, types of organizations from that vantage point. How do you feel like Chambers specifically are uniquely oriented to engage effectively in the legislative space? Why is it important for them to be doing that?

 

Damola [00:05:24]: Yeah, so Chambers sit in a really interesting intersection of commercial and non-commercial activity. When we think about the kinds of organizations that we work with at plural, we kind of bucket them broadly into commercial and non-commercial. Right. Non-commercial are nonprofits, government agencies. Commercial are for-profit corporations, lobbying firms, law firms, so on and so forth. But the thing that’s interesting about Chambers is they kind of sit in between, right? The tax designation obviously is one of a nonprofit, but a lot of the work and the advocacy and the stakeholders are commercial entities. And that kind of is the case with trade associations as well. But I think it’s even more unique when it comes to Chambers, particularly because of the fact that they extend beyond just a specific industry group. It’s more around the community of stakeholders, which is more than just one industry or one kind of commercial sector. And I think that’s really interesting one, it’s intellectually stimulating. Right. Chamber leaders, particularly those that work in the policy and advocacy space, have a pretty good breadth of knowledge across the different industries and how they impact their city or their state or their region. And I find that to be like interesting kind of conversations and finding different ways to be able to help them with our platform because that is how our platform works, right? It’s not industry-specific, it’s industry-agnostic. So, Chamber leaders end up understanding very quickly the value proposition that we’re able to provide with our software because they themselves have to deal with the challenges of knowing so much about different policy areas across different industries and different sectors in the work that they do.

 

Amanda [00:07:00]: Can you talk about a Chamber you’ve worked with and what some of the results were?

 

Damola [00:07:04]: Yeah. So, the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce is one of my favorite customers, and a big part of that is because I’m from Minnesota and appreciate the St. Paul Chamber. We’re also members of the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce, and the work that they do I will look at it as like three categories. First category is issue areas that are focused on kind of business development, business orientation for their large commercial clients, right? In Minnesota, we have 21 Fortune 500 companies. Best Buy, Target, Cargill isn’t a publicly traded company, but again, another kind of large corporation. So, they do a lot of work focused on the partnership and the relationships that those stakeholders need. So that’s kind of one bucket. The second bucket are small businesses that need a lot of support, right? They don’t have a policy team, they don’t have a government relations team, but they at least have a seat at the table by being Chamber members. So, this is probably one of the unique situations for them where they actually are equal to those larger organizations that are Chamber members. And then the third bucket, when you look at number one being the larger organizations, number two being small businesses, number three are the actual community members in the St. Paul area that work at these organizations that also need to be advocated for. And all three of those stakeholders have a place at the table. Right. And I think that the ability for the St. Paul Chamber to bring all of those stakeholders together is what makes them unique. There’s a lot of overlap when it comes to what they’re advocating for, what they want to talk to the state government about, things related to taxation, things related to employment law, so on and so forth. And then it’s also a place where they can talk about the differences based off of the positions that they might have. Again, it’s just a really unique position that Chambers have and Chamber members have by being able to have a seat at the table in a situation that I don’t think happens a lot, right? I can’t think of another type of entity that is able to bring all of those stakeholders together.

 

Amanda [00:08:56]: Yes, I think you’re exactly right. It’s all about partnerships and getting people to work together and being in a unique position to facilitate that. What are some consistently successful policy strategies that you’ve seen different Chambers employing that might be helpful for our listeners?

 

Damola [00:09:13]: Yeah, I think the primary one, and I think the audience will resonate with this, is just being great listeners, right? The Chamber leaders that I see being like real leaders of their community are great listeners. They bring people together, they bring different stakeholders together. They don’t just prioritize a certain set of Chamber members because maybe their membership dues are a little bit higher, right? They really try to create a level playing field in an environment where everybody can be heard and listened to, because it’s really important when you talk about local policy and state policy for people to really feel involved. So, I think the Chamber leaders that exercise that level up, like, hey, let’s bring everybody to the table, regardless of the dues that they’re paying and treating as many stakeholders as possible, as true equals, so that they’re in a position to be able to work together and really be able to advocate for the policies that they think are in the best interest of as many stakeholders as possible is what I’ve seen great Chamber leaders effectively do.

 

Amanda [00:10:11]: And the interesting thing too about Chambers is it’s so diverse in terms of what responsibilities fall under that organization, how big they are, of course, depending on community size. So, thinking about maybe someone new to these types of responsibilities who’s just been put in charge of policy at a Chamber or just a smaller Chamber where it’s a couple of staff members just doing a lot, trying to get their feet wet in this arena. What advice would you have for someone like that? And what they should focus on?

 

Damola [00:10:39]: Yeah, and I answer this humbly because it’s going to sound like I’m plugging the work that we do, but utilize technology if you’re under-resourced, and I think Chambers are historically under-resourced, a lot of different entities are under-resourced, particularly non-commercial ones. Technology can be your best friend, it can supplement and elevate the work that you’re doing, not as a replacement but as an augmentation. And I think when you look at how artificial intelligence has made a splash into kind of the consciousness of not just kind of everyday America, but professional America, there’s no time like the present to do the research and find the tools and the technology that can help augment your work. Whether you’re a large Chamber that feels decently resourced but could always use more resources, can always be more effective, can always be more efficient, can always grow their membership base, or a small policy team at a smaller kind of super local Chamber. Hyper-local Chamber technology can be a really useful way and a really important way for you to augment your work and be more effective and also to be able to show and showcase the great work that you’re doing. So, I would definitely advocate for people, regardless of size of Chamber size or organizational size, to really look and do research on how technology can help augment your work.

 

Amanda [00:11:48]: So, you mentioned AI, and I saw you recently gave a talk about responsible artificial intelligence and applying that in this realm. Can you tell us more about that?

 

Damola [00:11:59]: Yeah. So, I’ve been asked to speak at various places from Congress to state roundtables on ethical and responsible AI and how to deploy that. And for us at Plural, we use AI in a lot of the work that we do. And most of our features are based off of AI or leverage AI. And what we do kind of simply is we use AI to analyze and summarize policy. We have a lot of workflow automation that comes from that. But primary use case is answering the question of how can we use artificial intelligence to help people, help organizations understand policy better, faster, quicker, more efficiently, so that they can go and do their work. That’s fundamentally how we think about it. But then more broadly speaking, when you think about responsible and ethical AI, that’s not just from the perspective of the big companies that have built the foundational large language models or these kind of foundational artificial intelligence programs and models, right? The Googles, the OpenAIs, the Anthropics, these are the big names that we see testify at committee hearings and that type of thing in Congress. It’s also up to small companies like ours or tech startups like us at Plural to think about how we are actually building our large language models, fine-tuning them, thinking about how and who we’re selling our software to, thinking about how we’re educating our customers on how our artificial intelligence works. Those things are important when it comes to deploying AI responsibly. And that third one, educating your customers on how AI works, to me is really critical. Like what we’ve seen in the industry is people just say AI, AI, AI when they’re selling a software product and they’re not explaining to the users or the customers that they’re selling that AI product to of how this thing actually works. So, when we have conversations with customers, when we have conversations with folks that are looking to use our software, we want to make sure that they understand what goes into this “AI.” Right. How have you trained the model? What data did you use to do that? How effective is it? Do you have any best practices that you can share with us? So, people feel knowledgeable about the fact that they’re leveraging a tool that is using AI in the work that they’re doing. And that’s just one example of deploying AI responsibly.

 

Amanda [00:14:20]: Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens with it in the coming years.

 

Damola [00:14:24]: Yeah. What I will say is that we are often hesitant and scared to try things that are new or to embrace new technologies, new innovations, because we don’t understand them. I do not think that that should be the case with AI. We have the tools to understand how artificial intelligence works, how generative AI works, how large language models work. So what I would encourage for folks that are listening to do is just go and educate yourself on it. You can literally go into those AI chatbots and ask the AI chat bot to explain to you how it works and it’ll tell you exactly how it works.

 

Amanda [00:15:00]: Hello, who are you?

 

Damola [00:15:01]: Tell me about yourself, ChatGPT. It’ll do that. So I definitely encourage folks to go out and try to understand it because the technology is not going away. It’s something that is going to permeate every aspect of our lives, from healthcare to education to public policy. So instead of kind of saying that, shoving it to the side, or not wanting to learn more about it because it’s new and different, a little bit scary, take a different approach and just say that I’m going to try to embrace this and understand this as much as I possibly can. Again, you can use the AI tools to actually have them explain to you how they work. Innovation isn’t going anywhere.

 

Amanda [00:15:38]: It’s true. Shifting gears a bit here, talent attraction is something that’s top of mind for a lot of our listeners. So, there have been so many big-picture changes during and after the Pandemic. A lot of communities are thinking about, how do we get more workers here. And there’s so many big demographic things that it’s definitely a concern, right? Like having enough people in your community for the jobs you’re trying to fill, the goals you’re trying to meet, et cetera, et cetera. How can the legislative environment, policy, etc., in a certain community have an impact on that?

 

Damola [00:16:10]: That’s a great question, and honestly, I don’t know if I have a great answer for it. It’s something that I think about a lot, right? Like we at Plural, we’re a remote-only company, and we’ve been a remote-only company since before the Pandemic. Since 2019. We started building our team and building this company, we decided that we were going to be remote only and scale ourselves remote-only. But then to your point, Amanda, as the pandemic rolled in and has kind of like subsided now, and we’ve seen more companies, one, go remote and then two, start asking their workforce to come back to the office and start working from the office again. We know a big part of that is pressure from the cities that those companies are based in, right? Because there’s a lot of commercial real estate that’s kind of empty right now. A lot of small businesses, particularly restaurants, that are usually thriving during lunch hour, are struggling right now because people aren’t working from the office. So, there’s a lot of external pressure for the corporations and there’s also internal pressure. Right. I think a lot of operators believe that their workforce is more productive if they’re in-office versus working remotely. And I think there’s some truth to that, but I think some of that is also sometimes unfounded. And I think every company is unique. But to go back to your question and say, what kind of environment can we create that allows small cities, allows really all cities to be able to thrive again from the perspective of having the workforce back in those cities right? Not so dispersed. And I think the answer to that is incentives. How can we create incentives? How can we incentivize the employees instead of focusing on the employers, how can we incentivize the employees, the workforce, to say, I want to go back, not that I’m being forced to go back into the office, I want to go back into the office? How do we create more modern cities? How do we make transportation easier for people to be able to commute? How can we do that? How can we make it easier for people to come in into work? Right. As opposed to focusing on having the carrier to the stick for the employer, really focusing on what do employees need to be able to thrive inside of the cities that they work and operate in? If we switch our mindset to policies that are more focused on that, then employees will want to come back. They’re not going to be forced to come back to the cities because of their employer. So, again, like making it easier to get in, right? Public transportation, faster public transportation. Cleaner, safer public transportation. The amenities that are in cities that are more conducive, creating childcare around condensed areas of employment. All of those things need to be talked about and addressed so that we’re incentivizing the workforce to come back to the office.

 

Amanda [00:18:52]: Yes. That’s definitely a perspective shift to think about it that way. So we’re heading towards wrapping up. I always wrap up with a fun question, but before we get to that, anything else you’d like to add to our conversation that I didn’t ask about?

 

Damola [00:19:05]: Yeah, I would just say that. If anybody’s interested in learning more about what we do at Plural, please feel free to visit our website, pluralpolicy.com, or just email me [email protected].

 

Amanda [00:19:19]: So, tell our listeners where you’re based and if someone were to visit, what is one fun bucket list thing they should be sure to do?

 

Damola [00:19:28]: I’m based in Atlanta, Georgia, and the bucket listing and I don’t know if this is a bucket listing. I would say this is more of a do you want to come down to Atlanta and have a good time and have some fun? My recommendation is a restaurant called Rock Steady, and it is amazing food, but more importantly, it is amazing music and just an absolutely fun time, particularly if you’re like, around my age, like 35 to 45, right? You don’t want to go out where the super young people are hanging out. You still want to have yourself, like, a nice, enjoyable time. I highly recommend Rock Steady, my favorite restaurant and my favorite lounge here in Atlanta.

 

Amanda [00:20:04]: All right, well, thank you so much, Damola. This was a really different type of interview, and I think our listeners are going to get a lot out of it. Thanks for taking a few minutes.

 

Damola [00:20:12]: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

 

Amanda [00:20:18]: Thanks for listening to the Livability podcast, where we take you inside America’s best cities. At Livability, we highlight the unsung awesomeness of small and mid-sized cities across the country. We also partner with communities to reach their target companies and potential residents through digital content and print magazine programs. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate, and review this show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also learn more about us livabilitymedia.com. Have an idea for an upcoming episode? Email me at [email protected]. Until next time, from Livability, I’m Amanda Ellis, sharing the stories of America’s most promising places.