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In this series, we deep dive with the minds behind EcoMap to break down how we do what we do and how it helps ecosystems to grow and thrive.
Data Gathering and Intelligence
Anna Brinley is the Director of Data and Research at EcoMap. Fresh off earning a master’s in urban and regional planning from the University of Maryland, a mutual connection brought her into Pava LePere’s orbit. Pava was looking for an entrepreneurial ecosystem expert and their mutual friend knew just the person. Anna quickly fell in love with supporting small businesses and the economic development engines that make that possible.
What does your role entail?
Essentially, I oversee the people and the systems that go out and collect our data, maintain our data, and put it all together in the ecosystem map.
I’m one of the rare EcoMap employees whose title hasn’t changed since the beginning. I really liked Pava’s energy and loved this idea of understanding and gathering all the information about the supports in an ecosystem, the stuff beyond just job creation but changing the trajectory of generations and looking at wealth-building strategies.
Some of our larger customers do have a person heading up data and are invested in mapping, but they are challenged with keeping the data up to date and making it easy to find. For our smaller customers, there might be an employee or intern maintaining a spreadsheet of resources and organizations. But that’s very time consuming and not super user friendly. We, and I in my role in particular, can really be a vital resource for them.
Talk a little bit about EcoMap’s philosophy when it comes to gathering, curating, and maintaining data.
Our product is heavily focused on discovering what the unique needs of our customers are. When we first meet with a customer, we ask a ton of questions that really drill down on who they want to reach, what they want to be able to find, their goals, etc. Once we understand the scope, through that collaborative process, we can drill down into data types.
What do you mean when you reference data types?
Ecosystems are an ever-changing network of different yet interconnected nodes or data types. When we do ecosystem mapping, we try to classify and categorize these different nodes in the ecosystem, according to their function. For example, an accelerator program is something an entrepreneur can use or a residency program for artists.
We’re a SaaS company. Everything is not 100 percent customized, but what we can do is take the specific information about your ecosystem and break it down into standard sets of data types, resources, inflection points, events, and news. Then, we essentially go out looking for those things according to what you want to see in your ecomap.
Can you define the difference between primary and secondary data assets?
Sure. Primary assets, like Entrepreneur Support Organizations for example, are more static and provide a consistently high value to the user. While we consider secondary assets, like individual, one-time funding opportunities, to be high turnover. Extremely useful in the higher volume we deliver them, but the usefulness per asset is relatively low compared to a primary asset. Secondary assets are important, but fleeting, which makes them hard to maintain. They are things like job listings, one-off events, etc. We’re very excited to be able to evolve our data product to include other kinds of secondary assets, more of these things that are one-off but really important, especially when you’re trying to attract users to your ecosystem.
Let's talk about the use of keywords in our data strategy.
Maybe the most important thing we do beyond going out and finding the data assets is keywording. Keywording is a process that gives meaning to your data and makes it more navigable.
So, for example, it’s really important we understand which resources are available for early stage founders, because it’s not going to be helpful for you to look at a private equity investor if you’re an early stage business. So what are all the attributes of each sector and how do we ensure we are characterizing those appropriately?
For an ideal, clean data set, the essential information about an asset could be gathered in three to five keywords, but some hover around eight keywords. There isn’t a standard formula since we recognize each ecosystem is unique.The goals of the ecomap and what it is trying to solve for is truly what determines how many assets are required
Over the four years you’ve been at EcoMap, what’s changed over time when it comes to data curation and gathering?
At EcoMap, we’ve gotten smarter about the way we work with customers to define the scope of an ecosystem and to understand what their use case is so when we map the ecosystem, we’re really doing it in a way that’s going to serve their primary goals.
We’ve also learned a lot about standardizing things like keywording in the interest of being able to use that data, not just to populate ecomaps, but to be able to futurecast and look at different ecosystems that may be comparable and be able to learn from each one.
Let's shift to Ecosystem Intelligence. Specific to EcoMap, can you talk a little bit about the analytics trend in terms of what you provide customers with today and how that looks in the future?
Today, the analytics that come standard with every EcoMap is essentially usage data. What are people clicking on? What are they moving through the ecosystem to find? What are they searching for? How often are they coming back to the site? This is all really useful information about the ecomap itself and how useful that tool can be to the folks in your ecosystem.
What we are developing now is various ways to use your core data set, the resources, the organizations, the jobs, the events, and the news, and put that information into context to understand how well your ecosystem is working.
How do you define Ecosystem Intelligence?
At EcoMap, Ecosystem Intelligence is a suite of products—from the very standardized to the fully custom—that allow us to learn from the data we’ve collected and from publicly available datasets to deliver insights into how things are going in your ecosystem.
What additional intelligence are customers able to see? What have you found is important to ecosystem builders?
One of the really cool things about what we’ve been able to do over the last year or so is dig into our own data product and see what we can learn from it. What information and insights are going to be really useful to our customers and to ecosystem builders more broadly?
We feel like we’ve got a good sense of what’s going on in there right now and then by bringing in more publicly available data like population and census data for one example, we can get a really interesting 30,000-foot view. And the more people and the more ecosystem builders join EcoMap, the better that view is really going to be, the better our knowledge of ecosystems across the country we’ll be. We are really looking forward to being able to learn and share our knowledge from that data exploration.
What kind of data are you finding customers want to see or metrics they're trying to chase?
Especially among our entrepreneurial ecosystem customers, they’re really interested in the breakdown of resources and organizations that support specific categories of entrepreneurs. For example, Baltimore City and the Baltimore tech ecosystem are focused on equity and access, so an important data point to evaluate equity initiatives and programming is how many programs in the Baltimore ecosystem are targeted specifically for black founders.
Are customers looking for data to show that they're bringing an impact to their community?
Yes, which is why we’re developing the Ecosystem Intelligence products. One of the interesting things we’re doing with an Arts customer right now is building dashboards and analytics products for them about the organizations and their ecosystem and how they are doing financially over time. There’s a lot of publicly available data we can bring in to understand how much of their funding is unrestricted, how much of it comes from programs that may begin or end, how involved is their board, etc. And then they should be able to understand – right in these dashboards we’re building for them – the sustainability of their ecosystem.
Can you talk a little bit about how EcoMap maintains data and why that's important?
Absolutely. We’re a data company. Data is our core product if nothing else. And that means we understand that the minute a piece of data goes out of date, it is useless to everyone. Ecosystem mapping was born out of the idea that it’s tough and time consuming to keep information up to date. Our technology has been built in such a way that we can detect when certain information about an asset has changed and continuously push through updates so you don’t have to.
On average, we save a customer about 300 hours a year, which, if you do the math, is eight weeks of manual effort. We provide a significant amount of efficiency.
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