Category: Product

A note from Plural’s CEO, Damola Ogundipe:

The Investors

Aaron Perman, Principal at S3 (lead investor): “Plural has built the most effective software platform for government affairs professionals with its collaborative workflow and rich public policy dataset.” said Aaron Perman, Principal, S3 Ventures. “The company has an impressive track record of enabling its large and rapidly growing client base of Fortune 500 companies, trade associations, and leading advocacy organizations to achieve their public policy objectives. We are excited to partner with CEO Damola Ogundipe and the impressive team to further accelerate Plural’s rapid growth.” 

Bobak Emamian, Partner at Debut Capital: “Since meeting Damola in 2020, we have been beyond impressed with his leadership and the team’s ability to build a world-class product and organization.” said Bobak Emamian, Partner at Debut Capital. “Plural has consistently met and exceeded its goals and we couldn’t be more thrilled for this next chapter.”

The Journey

When we started Plural, we began our mission of using data and technology to increase government transparency and increase democratic participation. Since bringing our flagship legislative intelligence and collaboration software to market in 2019, 100+ organizations and 2,000+ users have tracked and influenced 50,000+ bills all over the country. We’ve helped organizations work and influence policy in areas ranging from data privacy to voting rights, infrastructure to women’s health, and cannabis to emissions. We are proud and excited to have been able to build a high-growth company that is at the forefront of social good.

The future of Plural will continue to be driven by our values: exercising transparency, being people-first, and practicing audacious thinking. As we scale, we’ll continue to invest in our people and our products as we build a world-class public policy data and software company.

We’re thankful to have S3 join us as a partner, and Aaron Perman join our Board of Directors. Aaron’s passionate belief in my leadership, our team, and our collective vision is exciting and we’re looking forward to working and building together.

I’d also like to thank our over 100 customers, large and small, across the country. We’re fortunate to work with organizations as diverse as Comcast, Google, Common Cause, The Center for Secure and Modern Elections, America Votes GA, The University of Minnesota, Fredrikson and Byron Law, and The Austin Chamber of Commerce among many others. Thank you all for giving us an opportunity to win your business, prove our value, and continue to innovate how smart policy work gets done with you.

Our Products

Plural: Using legislative intelligence, our flagship product, Plural automates the process of discovering, tracking, and analyzing legislation in progress. For example, surfacing similar bill text, or identifying which bills among hundreds or thousands, are gaining momentum. Using Plural’s Workspaces feature, customers can invite internal teams, clients, partners, organizers, and activists to collaborate, without the cost of licensing seats.

Open States by Plural: Since 2009, Open States has provided advocacy organizations, journalists, researchers, and the public with data about legislation across all 50 statues, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. In addition to information publicly available and searchable on the site, Open States supports a community of over 11,000 technical users by providing API access and downloads of aggregated legislative information.

The Plural Team

I’m incredibly grateful for the team we’ve built at Plural. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank each one of our team members for joining me on this journey. As I often say, we’re a team, not a family. But the strongest and most successful teams are unified in their goal, unwavering in their commitment to accomplishing that goal, resilient in the midst of adversity, and clear-eyed and heart-filled in their trust in each other. Thank you all for upholding our company culture and our values.

I’d also like to thank my co-founders, Yemi Adewunmi and Shawntera Hardy. You’re two of the most incredible, ambitious, and resilient people I’ve ever met, and it’s been an honor working and building this company with you.

Read the latest press release from Plural.

Plural, a technology company providing legislative data and intelligence products, raises a $10M Series A funding round. The funding will be used to expand the company’s impact on public policy data innovation, aggressively expand sales and marketing efforts, and broaden product development.

The funding round was led by S3 Ventures, and with participation from Menlo Ventures, Consonance Investment Managers, Debut Capital, and Colin Kaepernick. Returning investors include Backstage Capital, ffVC, M25, and Higher Ground Labs.

Its software, Plural, leverages state and federal legislation to unlock opportunities in government relations and advocacy work. Their customers, including Comcast, Google, Common Cause, and The Center for Secure and Modern Election, use Plural’s innovative technology to stay automatically updated on fast-moving legislation across the country.

Legislative Intelligence & Collaboration

The company’s unique approach to public policy management centers on what they’ve coined legislative intelligence™ and collaboration. Their product’s innovation comes at a time when public policy professionals, lobbyists and advocacy organizations are looking for a reliable tool as their work moves in a digital and remote world. Plural’s software enables organizations to stay on top of updates in the legislature and share information with various stakeholders, while providing best-in-class customer experience and support.

The investment brings Plural’s total funding since launching their legislative intelligence and collaboration platform in 2019 to over $14 million. The new funding will help the company aggressively expand their sales and marketing efforts, broaden and accelerate product development, and continue their social-impact-driven mission.

About Plural

Plural is led by co-founders Damola Ogundipe (CEO); Yemi Adewunmi (COO); and Shawntera Hardy (Advisor). The all Black founding team is shaking up how public policy work gets done by developing cutting-edge legislative tracking tools which make it easy to discover, interpret, and collaborate on public policy change. Plural gives government relations professionals an edge by giving them clarity on the status and changes to bills, enabling them to develop more inclusive strategies and quickly take action on pending legislation. Plural’s tools deliver open access to legislative information, and provide simple to use, modern approaches to public policy tracking and collaboration.

Follow Plural on LinkedIn to keep up to date on company news and ongoings.

About S3 Ventures

With $900M in assets under management, S3 Ventures is the largest venture capital firm focused on Texas. Backed by a philanthropic, multi-billion-dollar family for 17+ years, we empower great entrepreneurs with the patient capital and true resources required to grow extraordinary, high-impact companies in Business Technology, Consumer Digital Experiences, and Healthcare Technology. For more information, please visit www.s3vc.com.

Legislation doesn’t get passed in a vacuum—the path to progress starts with building a winning coalition. To move your public policy agenda forward, you need to partner with anyone—and everyone—who can help you influence the outcome.

Whether you need to work with lobbyists, attorneys, government relations professionals, organizers, or volunteers, connecting all of the key players so you engage stakeholders in meaningful ways is critical.

Plural is legislative tracking software with built-in workflow and collaboration features—called Workspaces—that help you keep your team on the same page across all of your issues. Think of Workspaces as the digital conference room you gather everyone who matters in to have conversations. Workspaces is where you meet to plan strategies, share updates and assign tasks across your team.

But instead of living inside an office, this conference room is digital. Even better, it’s a central digital repository for the many ongoing conversations across teams who need to collaborate on public policy anytime from anywhere.

How Workspaces Work

The tools and strategies that have gotten the job done in the past are being rapidly outpaced by techniques that rely on digital collaboration. Not too long ago, you may have sat around a table with your colleagues sifting through this session’s relevant bills. You discussed which ones you were against, which ones were your priority, and even went through each bill’s language line by line, flagging on-point phrases and striking restrictive ones. 

With Plural, you can quickly and easily create Workspaces for specific teams to collaborate based on: 

• Issue
  Create Workspaces for an issue—criminal justice reform, healthcare, or clean energy—to keep relevant information organized and easily accessible.

• Region
  Give team members working on federal or state issues their own spaces. (National organizations usually set up workspaces for their state chapters.)

• Role
  Connect everyone with similar responsibilities—lobbyists, lawyers, clients, interns—in one spot to facilitate sharing ideas.

More Ways to Use Workspaces

Law firms often create a Workspace for each of their clients, either using the space to stay updated on all the moving pieces on their behalf or inviting their clients to collaborate with them on pieces of legislation. 

Coalitions, like the Partnership on Waste Management in the Twin Cities, often use Workspaces to track various public policy initiatives, breaking them out by issues like recycling and waste.

“Plural helped America Votes Georgia and our partners become more coordinated than ever. At the end of the day, we could log on to Plural and get a rundown on everything happening under the Gold Dome.”

— Ashley Robinson, Executive Director at Progress Georgia, and previously at America Votes Georgia

Changing How Public Policy Teams Collaborate

Plural designed Workspaces to support effective democratic processes by encouraging access, collaboration and inclusion in policy discussion. Winning public policy battles is hard work, but thanks to Workspaces, collaboration with everyone on your public policy team is easier than ever.

Plural is intuitive and easy to use, so teams can collaborate in digital Workspaces right away.

Even better, the solution comes with unlimited users. Public policy teams can foster connections, exchange information, and work together to make lasting change without having to pick and choose who gets a license. 

There’s no doubt that moving from an in-person conference room to a shared digital workspace is transforming how public policy work gets done. See how Workspaces can help you take your public policy work to the next level—get started with Plural today. 

Learn More About Plural

Plural helps busy public policy professionals advance their issues by providing the most intelligent, streamlined, and collaborative public policy tracking platform available.

• Save time with automated legislative tracking
• Streamline workflows so you can respond effectively and quickly to change
• Synchronize team and partner strategy using shared workspaces
• Collaborate with internal and external teams without limit
• Modernize your team’s processes with on-demand training and support

From the 2009 PyCon, where we really kicked things off, through today this community has remained essential to the project. During the project’s first five years at Sunlight we continued to grow the project, along the way bringing more people into the community.  Whether it was a developer who changed jobs after working on the project, or someone who taught themselves to code so they could contribute in their state, these stories have always been my favorites to share.

The community of course isn’t just the 132 developers that have contributed to Open States’ scrapers; it also consists of those using the data, the APIs, and countless others who have found ways to promote the project through their own work. The project has seen use by some of the largest advocacy organizations, but also by the smallest, an individual citizen in a state looking to contact their legislator on an issue they feel passionate about.  The project has been used by national and local media organizations, state legislatures themselves, cited in countless academic papers, and a growing number of startups have used the product as well.  

Truthfully, the commercial usage sometimes led to some difficult conversations among the team, as at least one startup took Open States’ code wholesale and began to adapt it privately.  This, while perfectly legal, was of course not in the spirit of the project and at times felt like a threat to the project’s existence.  As many open source projects must, we accepted this as a small downside.

But we were more than glad to see that not all of these commercial organizations simply hoped to extract value and move on.  Despite a bad experience or two, quite a few of these organizations were genuinely interested in giving back.  This was the core of the decision to not ban commercial use or attempt to weigh down the source code with various encumbrances.  These commercial users were just as much a part of the community as others, and could contribute in meaningful ways.

This became more important when the project became independent with the closure of Sunlight Labs back in 2016. It was here that the initial investment in openness and building a community really paid off, the team of ex-Sunlight employees that inherited the project all had day jobs, and we were depending on small grants and donations to keep the project afloat. Several organizations using the project stepped up in big ways, with major code contributions, financial support, and arranging introductions to potential donors.   It was during this period that I first became aware of Plural, as their Chief Data Officer, Jesse Mortenson, began to contribute to community discussions. I was grateful that this startup was willing and able to give back to Open States, and understood the importance of collaboration. 

2020 was in many ways a banner year for Open States, with several grants allowing me to resume full time work on the project. Of course, the grants were finite, and the pandemic also shifted a lot of funding priorities away from this kind of civic infrastructure project. Thinking forward to 2021 I knew that the future of the project was again in question. Would I try to maintain the project in my free time as I had for the first independent years? continue with some reduced capacity and accompanying sacrifices? or, worst case, have to step away and shut key parts of the project down?

I knew no matter what that I wanted the project to continue. It was right as I began to explore these opportunities that Plural reached out.  I could tell right away from my conversations with Jesse and their CEO Damola that they wanted to see Open States succeed, not just eliminate it as competition or keep others from benefiting from the openness. 

As we continued to discuss what joining forces would look like, it became clear that this choice was the best for both the Open States community and for Plural.  I grew confidence that Open States could continue to grow under their umbrella, while remaining open.  Open States’ growth will be driven in part by Plural and by community needs, in turn increasing the quality and breadth of public data.

I’m joining Plural as its new Director of Public Data because I know that they are a team that is passionate about doing good and that understands the importance of tools like Open States for the communities it has served for the past twelve years. I am excited that Open States’ future will no longer be tied to the free time of a few former employees of a nonprofit, or the whims of grant-giving organizations. I’m eager to continue to grow the Open States community in new ways as the project enters its thirteenth year.

Thank you for sticking with me,

James Turk
Director of Public Data, Plural

Plural is working towards a world where public policy is transparent and accessible to communities; because, if you can’t see it, you can’t change it. In 2019 we launched Plural, our legislative intelligence and policy management software, for policy professionals to monitor, report and collaborate and create deeper insights on legislation. 

Today, our technology helps some of the nation’s leading organizations and advocacy groups track and investigate important policy from all 50 states, Congress, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Since 2019, we’ve doubled our funding, employed 13 full-time teammates, and have closed notable partners such as Comcast, Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and Fair Fight.

We know that our software tool relies on clean, reliable data in order to serve our users. At first, we started where we could, but quickly realized that we needed additional support if we wanted to build around complex state legislative data. We embraced Open States, the leader in open legislative data in the country. Over the past 2 years, we’ve collaborated with and contributed to Open States’ passionate community of volunteer engineers who support public data. As we began to look at the future of the Open States project, we saw an opportunity to be a permanent resource and to ensure continued access and transparency to this civic data.

Today, we are announcing our acquisition of Open States and the expansion of our product offering. This is a natural fit for us because we share the mission of empowering people to impact policy through innovations in technology and data. More importantly, Open States brings an invaluable vibrant community of technologists focused on civic data projects. Open States will continue to serve as a public resource for researchers and the greater community. In addition, Open States Founder James Turk has joined Plural as our Director of Public Data leading a team responsible for growing our political data infrastructure. 

We are excited about growing our team and furthering our investment in open civic data. This acquisition helps us with our mission of making the democratic process more transparent and accessible using technology. We believe that when we can see the workings of power around us, we can lend our voices to shape how that power is exercised.

We’re excited to share these updates with you. Let’s take a look…

Customize your reports

We’ve made improvements to the way you can export the bills you’re keeping track of. Quickly generate a spreadsheet of the legislation that’s organized by your Tags or Teams. Select the legislative data that you want to include, then export your report!

Better access to tags

The latest updates to bill tagging now allows you to more easily tag a bill from any list view. Use the tag icon to access a dropdown of your tags. When viewing a bill’s detail page, you’ll now see your tags near the top of the page underneath the bill number.

Using Plural’s tagging feature is one of the best ways to keep your policy work organized.

For example, some of our policy pros are using Tags to manage their client engagement work by tagging bills by their client name or next action step. Other policy pros on Plural are using Tags to categorize legislation by priority and policy stance.

See for yourself how you can start organizing bills with a single click. Our CEO, Damola, walks you through how tagging works in Plural:

As the world reacts to the pandemic, governments are reacting as quickly as they can to address the impacts of COVID-19. New legislation in Congress and state legislatures around the country are emerging and are quickly changing. 

Plural is an easy to use tool for keeping up with these changing policies as they move forward at both the state and federal levels of government.

In a few easy steps you can search, track, and be notified when a COVID-19 bill advances through the legislative process:

Sign up for Plural

Because we believe that policy professionals deserve the best tools for keeping up with legislation during this challenging time, we’re offering Plural for free until the end of April, no obligation.

Keep track of changes to bills, your notes, files, conversations, and more with Plural – legislative intelligence and policy management software, made with policy professionals in mind.