Ecosystem builders face a fundamental tension. The work takes years to show results, but funders want proof in months. Monthly meetings, coffee conversations, and coordination efforts don’t always translate neatly into spreadsheets, yet they’re the foundation of everything that follows.
In EcoMap’s latest Ecosystem Talks, Amy Beaird, PhD, nationally recognized innovation strategist and co-founder of Ecosystem Edge, joined Anika Horn with Social Ventures to address this challenge. Beaird shared a practical framework for protecting the invisible infrastructure that makes ecosystems work while communicating value in language that funders can use.
The BANI Environment
Beaird opened by describing the structural mismatch ecosystem builders face. Building infrastructure takes three to five years. Funding arrives in 12-month increments. Political cycles shift priorities overnight. The demands keep increasing: prove collaboration, show impact, do more with less, and move faster.
“Funding cycles are shrinking, but the work is not shrinking,” Beaird said. “We all need three to five years to really build the infrastructure, but your funding is getting drip-fed to you in 12-month increments.”
She introduced the BANI framework (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible) to describe the current environment. Systems that look stable shatter suddenly. Small actions create massive effects while major investments yield little visible change. Events defy logic daily.
The BANI framework represents an evolution from VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous), which was developed in the 1990s. BANI better captures how unpredictable and incomprehensible the environment has become.
Three Core Capabilities Every Ecosystem Team Needs
Beaird outlined three distinct capabilities required for ecosystem building. Most teams excel at one, maybe two, but need all three to adapt effectively.
1. Building Relationships – The trust-building work that allows competitors to collaborate, the translation between sectors, and the navigation of local politics. Beaird called this the art of ecosystem building.
2. Delivering Impact – The tangible work of supporting founders, strengthening small businesses, and creating pathways to opportunity. Turning the mess and chaos into momentum. Beaird called this the craft of ecosystem building.
3. Demonstrating Value – The often-overlooked work of documenting outcomes, speaking funder language, and building the case that sustains the other two capabilities. Making invisible work visible and translating emergence into reportable outcomes.
“You don’t have to be excellent at all three, but your team does,” Beaird said.
A Four-Step Framework for Translating Invisible Work
Beaird also walked through a practical approach for making coordination work visible.
Step 1: Surface the Invisible – Identify what you’re actually doing beyond the surface activity. When you host monthly meetings, what are you really accomplishing? Preventing five organizations from launching competing events? Maintaining space where rivals can build trust? Translating between the private sector and the public sector?
Step 2: Link Your Work to Impact – Connect your work to what would happen without it. Would three organizations launch duplicate programs? Would a major partnership fall apart over miscommunication? Would two funders invest in similar programs, creating inefficiency? With your coordination, partners might pool investment instead of competing. Organizations might co-create a shared intake system. Decision-making that used to take six months now takes six weeks.
Step 3: Frame for Investment – Bridge what you’re doing with what funders care about. Funders generally care about efficiency, sustainability, impact, evidence, positive stories, speed, and scale.
Beaird gave an example. Instead of “we hosted 12 monthly meetings with 30 cross-sector partner organizations and 300 attendees,” say “our coordination infrastructure prevents program duplication, saving an estimated $450K annually in redundant spending while enabling partners to pool resources and serve 300 entrepreneurs collaboratively instead of 100 individually.”
Step 4: Make Your Impact Visible – Identify where this impact shows up. Budget narratives, quarterly reports, strategic plans, funder presentations. When requesting $80,000 for an ecosystem coordinator, explain in your budget narrative that this person maintains the coordination infrastructure that prevented $450,000 in duplicative programming and enabled $2 million in collaborative grants over two years.
“This is the kind of language that you want to use,” Beaird said. “It’s not inflating your impact, it’s really showing your logic.”
Business Oregon’s Statewide Coordination
Beaird used Business Oregon as an example of the framework in practice. The state coordinates entrepreneur support through nine regional hubs using a hub and spoke model.
One central hub works with nine regional spokes, creating geographic coverage while reducing duplication. Regional needs get bubbled up to state leadership for faster decisions. Services are delivered consistently, and hubs share learning across regions.
“States want to fund things that their citizens and their regions need, but they have to know what they are,” Beaird explained. “Having this sort of hub and spoke model allows you to bubble up from the grassroots level what the needs are, but then from the top down level, connect that to the resources that a state or a region might have.”
EcoMap supports this through ecosystem mapping that identifies resources and determines which hub they serve. The platform includes a shared intake system via their Ecosystem Relationship Manager (ERM), where a single entrepreneur can enter through centralized intake and any regional hub can pick up that relationship and make referrals. An analytics layer shows both individual regional impact and collective statewide outcomes, helping the state identify where to make investments and where gaps exist.
The Coffee Meeting Question
Horn asked how to justify coffee meetings and relationship building that happens months before visible outcomes.
“Should they be paying me to grab coffee with entrepreneurs and stakeholders?” Horn asked. “We’re not solely responsible for this really cool thing that happens down the road.”
Beaird said relationship building is part of the coordination infrastructure. You have to have the relationships to build the trust to move anything forward. Focus on system-level impact rather than individual attribution.
“It’s gonna be windy, it’s gonna be chaotic, it’s gonna be not linear,” Beaird said. “But if you can start to explain how the system is resulting in these outcomes because of the competencies of the ecosystem building, because of the entropy that you’re fighting, the chaos that you’re fighting as an ecosystem builder and being that glue that ties it all together, that’s the value of an ecosystem builder.”
Otherwise, everything would devolve into chaos. That’s what makes the work valuable, even when the path from coffee meeting to outcome isn’t perfectly linear.
Measuring Social Capital and the Whole-Person Approach
Heather Lyne from the Richmond ecosystem raised a challenge many builders face. How do you measure social capital when traditional metrics like “business plans created” or “event attendance” miss the actual impact?
“It’s so hard to log all of the conversations that you have when you are in a group or when you’re out in community and people come up to you and say, ‘Oh, this happened because of X, Y, Z, or I’m so glad that I went to this or got into this program,’” Lyne said.
Richmond is exploring a story-gathering platform that analyzes entrepreneur narratives for emotions and conditions, translating qualitative experiences into data points. The goal is to advise the region’s 30-year upward mobility plan on what metrics actually matter for entrepreneurship and small business.
“We’re capturing the actual stories and voices of our business community,” Lyne said. “This is the reality of what their experiences are.”
Brian K. Marshall from BCL of Texas added perspective from an economic development lens. He suggested wealth creation as a fundamental metric that cuts across sectors.
The conversation surfaced a challenge many ecosystems face. Systems divide entrepreneurs into separate buckets—workforce, housing, childcare, business support—when entrepreneurs actually need integrated support.
Lyne described this tension. “You can have an entrepreneur that’s in and out of the workforce while they’re starting a business that needs help with housing, that needs help with childcare. And so I’m very interested in what it looks like to integrate that into a whole person approach.”
Marshall agreed, noting the importance of moving beyond transactional relationships with clients. “How do we keep them along to help them solve the problems by just asking deeper questions?”
Protecting the Foundation
Beaird closed by reminding participants that relationship-building and coordination aren’t overhead.
“This glue work that you all are doing is the real work,” Beaird said. “Translating your work into outcomes that funders can understand is really protecting the ability to do this work.”
The evidence already exists in the entrepreneurs served, the partnerships formed, and the inefficiencies prevented. The challenge is building a system to capture it and communicate it back to funders in a language they recognize.
Beaird emphasized that you already have the evidence. “The stories are there, the entrepreneurs have been served. The help is already happening. So you need a system to capture it in a way to communicate it back to your funders.”
She pointed to Lyne’s story-gathering approach as an example that goes beyond surveys or spreadsheets, capturing the different touchpoints that entrepreneurs have had and showcasing the value of an ecosystem approach.
Watch the full webinar
FAQ
- How do you measure the ROI of ecosystem coordination work?
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Focus on prevented duplication, accelerated decision-making, pooled resources, and collaborative funding secured. Translate activities into efficiency gains and impact metrics funders recognize.
- What language resonates most with funders when reporting ecosystem impact?
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Funders typically care about efficiency, sustainability, impact, evidence, speed, and scale. Frame your work in terms of cost savings, collaborative leverage, and outcomes enabled by coordination infrastructure.
- How long does ecosystem building actually take?
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Building foundational ecosystem infrastructure typically requires three to five years, though funders often operate on 12-month cycles. The mismatch creates pressure to demonstrate impact on unrealistic timelines.
- What’s the difference between VUCA and BANI frameworks?
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VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) was developed in the 1990s. BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible) was introduced in 2018 to describe a more extreme environment where systems shatter suddenly, small changes have massive effects, and events defy logic.
- How can ecosystem builders protect their coordination work during funding uncertainty?
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Document impact systematically, translate invisible work into measurable outcomes, maintain diverse funding sources, and engage funders directly in ecosystem activities so they experience the value firsthand.
