Politics is a numbers game and we’re not talking about the number of voters who show up for local, state or federal elections.
More than $3.37 billion dollars were spent on lobbying for U.S. policy changes in 2017, according to Statista. The billions spent annually are not focusing on endless political ads for voters.
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Neither was this money earmarked solely to influence what is now the biggest midterm election voter turnout — an estimated 113 million people.
No, this astronomical amount was spent by lobbyists to influence and persuade elected officials to support their clients’ agendas, whether genuinely pro-citizen or nefarious in nature.
Policies and elections are not just a big deal for North America. Recent clashes in Venezuela, Bangladesh, and other countries show the growing need for improving the political landscape. Improving the lives and economic status of citizens around the world requires help.
Civic Eagle believes it has just the help needed to bring positive solutions to policymakers and influencers in the U.S. and eventually abroad.
The platform, now in private beta, claims to make it easy and intuitive to discover state and federal legislation and proposed bills. It has easy search and filtering functions and smart recommendations for new bills that you may want to follow. It allows users to keep track of policies with customizable tagging and annotation, and to share notes.
I want to create a company that builds products that fix democracies — products that address transparency, corruption, lack of civic engagement and distrust in the news and media surrounding politics.
Damola Ogundipe, co-founder of Civic Eagle
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“Everyone deserves an educated point of view on democracy,” according to the Civic Eagle website.
Since launching in 2015, Damola has grown his team to include co-founders Yemi Adewunmi, Shawntera Hardy, and Ken Thompson. The team has raised around $600,000 from investors and is preparing to begin the Techstars Anywhere Program in February.
Being a person of color trying to scale a business and
Damola Ogundipe shares why pivoting his business was a healthy decision and how Civic Eagle is committed making the world a better place.
There are 169 democracies around the world. My five-year goal is to figure out how to help them all.
Damola Ogundipe, co-founder of Civic Eagle
Moguldom: Why did you start Civic Eagle?
Damola Ogundipe: The primary reason was general frustration with the lack of accessibility to political and policy information. It seemed as though there weren’t any great resources available to synthesize and understand legislation or politics in general, particularly when you want to drill down from the federal level to the state, local or municipal level. I wanted to try to find a way to fix it and solve that problem. It was something that was personally frustrating for me and a lot of my peers. I felt it impacted a lot of different people from an equity perspective.
Moguldom: The Civic Eagle software, Enview, originally started as a product for the average person (B2C) to understand legislation and then you changed to an enterprise (B2B) solution. What caused you to pivot?
Damola Ogundipe: In early 2018, we made the decision that it didn’t make any sense right now from a business perspective to try to go after the consumer or a regular person looking into political affairs. Only 15-to-20 percent of people even vote in the local elections, let alone are paying attention to local level policy ordinances. We decided to go back and work on the consumer or average voter later but cut our teeth with organizations and policy professionals today — the people that do this on a day-in-and-day-out basis. We had discovered these professionals need a lot of help. There hasn’t been a lot of technology innovation in the space of government affairs and regulatory affairs. When we recognized that, we started meeting with organizations, advocacy groups, nonprofits as well as corporations that have no government affairs and regulatory affairs departments.
We realized it made way more sense from a business health standpoint to work from a B2B perspective and really sink our teeth into solving the problems that they have because solving their problems is also a benefit for us as regular citizens and residents of the U.S. Our goal is to eventually go back and build a product for the regular person. It was a great decision for us. Things have moved very quickly since we made that pivot. Not to say voters weren’t interested in what we were building, but it is hard to build a scalable, sustainable product for consumers without a bunch of money. It really is cost inhibitive.
Moguldom: Are you fundraising or accepting capital for Civic Eagle?
Damola Ogundipe: Yes. We’re raising $800,000 for our pre-seed round now. We have raised $600,000 and we are working to close the last $200,000 in the next three to five weeks. We will be starting the Techstars Anywhere program in February and they will also be an investor. We want to close the fund up and then try to keep growing. If we need to raise more capital, we’ll do so in the future.
Moguldom: You’re originally from Nigeria, but have lived here since you were a kid. What challenges did you face as a founder with a diverse background?
Damola Ogundipe: Yes, I was born in Nigeria. Our family moved to Minnesota when I was 6. For whatever reason, my parents decided to settle in Minnesota so I’m a Nigerian and also Minnesotan. Our founding team is Black with two of us born in Nigeria. One of the challenges we face as a collective group — even though we have really great experiences — is just a lack of true belief we are the team to pull this idea off. Once we get into the room and we pitch the solution, and what we’re doing, we’ve always gotten positive reactions for the most part. But I do think that there is some doubt in us and if our team and vision can become a unicorn.
More often than not, you’re in front of investors that are white males from the coast. We are not white, and we’re from the Midwest. We almost have nothing in common except for maybe being male if the males from our team are pitching. Half of our team is female, so they often end up with nothing in common with the investors when they go to pitch. One way to get over this barrier is to show up prepared. We go in very sophisticated and ensure we have our figures, strategies, and testimonials from customers and investors laid out. We hope by coming in very organized we can at least eliminate a little bit of the barrier and connect on a business level. But just like everybody else that is a person of color, particularly for Black folks, and even more so for the Black women, we are trying to overcome these barriers on a daily basis.
Moguldom: How are you making sure you are providing the best product and services for your clients?
Damola Ogundipe: We pride ourselves in being a culture of innovation and a culture of making sure we’re keeping the customer first. We always keep the end user in mind and that means that we’re always innovating, always iterating to make sure the customers are happy with whatever they’re seeing. We are always communicating our progress and updates to the customers and even investors. We want them to trust us and we want to maintain that trust. We also have a product advisory board. We meet with them once a month and go through what’s on our product roadmap, what we’re thinking about adding to the product or changing. We’re constantly in customer discovery mode and looking at what’s changing in the industry.
Moguldom: What motivates you as an entrepreneur?
Damola Ogundipe: My family motivates me. My parents having the West African immigration story of parents who immigrated to the U.S. is motivation for me. Immigrant parents want you to be as successful as you can be since they’ve left everything in their home country to bring you to this new place of opportunity. My job is to make sure I take advantage of the opportunity I’ve been blessed with by being here in the U.S. I know I wouldn’t have these opportunities, to be honest, in Nigeria. My biggest motivator is making sure I make my parents proud and I’m the kind of son they would want me to be. Secondarily to that, but just as important to me, is I just want the world to be a better place. Whatever I can do, and I know it sounds corny and cheesy, to make the world better, that’s what I’m going to do. For me, I found a way to do it through a vehicle I enjoy — entrepreneurship. Building a company to help people and the world become a better place motivates me and I’m pretty happy with myself.
Moguldom: Where do you see Civic Eagle in five years?
Damola Ogundipe: I don’t know. I mean the right answer of “exit and sell for a billion dollars” is there, right? But I’ll be honest, I don’t know what I want the outcome to be if that makes sense. I want to create a company that builds products that fix democracies. Products that address transparency issues, corruption, the lack of civic engagement and addresses the distrust in the news and media surrounding politics. I want to have a full suite of political products through technology that can solve different political democratic problems. Not just here domestically in the U.S., but hopefully in other democracies around the world. I want to take this to Nigeria and move to solve issues in Venezuela and Mexico. There are 169 democracies around the world. My five-year goal is to figure out how to help them all.
