Many partners, one voice
Brand identity and strategyPartnership developmentMessaging
When Open Media was engaged following a major grant from the James Irvine Foundation, Fresno County already had more than 20 respected organizations supporting small businesses, including community leaders, technical assistance providers, lenders, and trusted community-based organizations.
What did not exist was a shared identity, a unified narrative, or a coordinated investment strategy that could align these efforts into a cohesive system.
For decades, the ecosystem had functioned as parallel efforts and communications had never been meaningfully invested in at the collective level. This pattern is well documented. Research on cross-sector collaboration and collective impact shows that even strong individual organizations struggle to achieve system-level outcomes without shared goals, aligned activities, and continuous communication across partners.
At a time when complex economic challenges increasingly require coordinated, multi-sector approaches, the central question became how to translate a fragmented ecosystem into a coordinated strategy that funders could understand, trust, and invest in.
Approach
Listening and Discovery
We began by talking with each partner one-on-one. Over several months, we met with lenders, technical assistance providers, and community-based organizations to understand how they described their work, how they supported small businesses, and how they connected to others in the network.
From these conversations, we learned that Fresno already had the core pieces in place—lenders, technical assistance providers, and community organizations—but it was not clear how those pieces fit together.
It was difficult to see how a business would move through the system—from first contact, to training, to funding. This reflected what partners were already experiencing: small businesses faced fragmented support networks and barriers to accessing capital, even when resources existed.
Without shared language or a clear structure, it was difficult to explain how the system worked—or what funders were actually investing in.
Coalition Meetings
We then brought partners together to work through this as a group. The focus was on getting clear about how to describe the work, where roles differed, and how everything connected.
Together, we clarified:
Who provides capital (loans, grants, credit-building tools)
Who delivers technical assistance (training, coaching, financial readiness)
How community organizations connect entrepreneurs into the system
How referrals and handoffs happen between partners
This work reflected how SCALE Fresno is designed to operate: aligning lenders, service providers, and community organizations into a coordinated system where entrepreneurs can access support in one place, and providers can deliver services at the scale needed to be effective. As this became clearer, partners began to better articulate how the full system of capital, capacity, and community come together.
This clarity made it possible to develop SCALE Fresno’s investable plan: a coordinated strategy showing how capital is deployed, how businesses move through support, and how the system works together to help businesses start and grow. The plan outlines investments across capital access, technical assistance, and shared infrastructure to address long-standing gaps in the ecosystem.
Building a Multi-Partner Brand System
The work culminated in the public launch of a unified ecosystem identity at the SCALE Fresno Investor Summit.
Through this process, we developed:
A shared brand identity and narrative framework for the SCALE Fresno partnership
Aligned messaging across 20+ organizations
A coordinated five-year, $38 million Investable Plan
A targeted communications strategy to support funder engagement
A dedicated microsite to house the investment roadmap
Investor-facing materials and event assets
Production of the two-day SCALE Fresno Investor Summit
The Investable Plan itself reflects the system we built together. It outlines how capital, technical assistance, and community-based support work as one coordinated approach—pairing flexible capital tools with culturally competent services, strengthening nonprofit capacity, and building shared infrastructure to support small businesses across Fresno County.
More importantly, partners left with a shared way to describe their work and a clear understanding of how they fit together.
Lenders, service providers, and community organizations could point to where they sit in the system, how businesses move between them, and how their work contributes to shared outcomes. What had felt like separate efforts became a connected approach.
Communications became part of how the system operates.
It created a common language, clarified roles, and made the work easier to understand—for partners, for small businesses, and for funders. It also made it possible to present the ecosystem as something funders could invest in as a whole, rather than as a set of disconnected programs.
The result was stronger alignment across partners, clearer positioning in the market, and a more credible, investable system for long-term small business growth in Fresno County.
