By: Senior Consultant, Debbi Olley

It’s a hyperconnected world, we’re told, and you’ve likely used some sort of connecting relationships in your own life. Maybe you’ve played a version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with your friends. Or maybe, when looking for a new job, you’ve engaged in what my late mother (and plenty of others) called “networking.” Thanks to growing up in a household that valued personal introductions and making connections, I also love to connect people whenever I can. (“Oh, you’re going to Rome in a week? You should look up my college professor, who’s working on a book there right now!”)

In prospect development, our version of making connections—relationship mapping—is a topic that comes up often. Here at HBG, our founder, Helen Brown, wrote about it a month before COVID shutdowns hit. Helen’s post remains relevant more than five years later, since we continue to wrestle with these same questions. In the past few weeks alone, I’ve seen plenty of posts on PRSPCT-L about this topic. And so, in the spirit of Helen’s original piece, I’ve talked to my fellow researchers at HBG and have also used my own experience as a springboard. I hope it can be a helpful guide for you, too!

What Are We Hoping to Find?

My colleague Catherine sums this up beautifully below; her guidelines can help when deciding what you want for your own shop.

In general, the things she’s looking for in a good relationship mapping tool:

• A robust database of names with up-to-date data;
• Something that will answer the two most common relationship mapping questions:
  • “How can our organization connect to this person?”
  • “Who can this person introduce to our organization?”
• A way to create lists, definitely for individuals but ideally also for organizations;
• A user-friendly interface that lets me easily see the details behind each connection (both first and second degree connections);
• A way to export my findings into something relatively tidy so that I can show the results to clients.

Connections with a Cost

Altrata now owns some of the major connectors researchers have long relied on, including BoardEx, Boardroom Insiders, RelSci, WealthEngine, and Wealth-X. Kaleidoscope will be unveiling a new product soon, Path Explorer. Products such as Kindsight (iWave) also offer connections tabs on its profiles. For confirming family relationships or trying to trace family trees, Ancestry can be a terrific resource. Nexis for Development Professionals will also list relatives, neighbors, and other known associates.

As always, there are caveats with what each product can provide and areas where they may fall short. Best practices in prospect development makes it imperative to test products thoroughly before committing to it for your shop or team.

The Hard Work of Free Results

I’m going to bring in my HBG colleague Viola’s suggestion below to start this section off, since managing expectations is a key part of relationship mapping.

Relationship mapping can be really time consuming. What she often suggests is to handle it in a phased approach:

• Provide lists of current affiliations [to the client] (boards they’re currently serving on, other people that work for the same current employer).
• Let them eyeball the list to see if they know anyone.
• If they don’t, the names can be checked against the organization database to see if they have records.
• If that still doesn’t produce anyone, provide lists of former affiliations (boards they previously served on, people who were previously on a board with them but have since left the board, previous co-workers).
• Let them eyeball the list to see if they know anyone.
• If they don’t, the names can be checked against the organization database to see if they have records.

Viola also shared the following tips:

• Use the Wayback Machine internet archive (https://archive.org) to see previous versions of a board list.
• Don’t forget to look in your organization database. Some have a Relationship Tree that you can use to see who’s connected to who. Also, you can use queries to see who they might know (e.g., which other alumni attended during the same timeframe). You can also search for people who live on the same street or work in the same profession.
• Google the person’s name and site: org to see what organization affiliations they might have. You can also do that with site: edu to find education affiliations.

HBGer Maura uses an approach with one of her clients that is a version of something I’ve used in the past, too. I’ll bet others reading this have done something similar. Essentially, create a running spreadsheet of your organization’s board members/main connectors and add possible connections as you prospect and/or try to make connections between other donors. You can run keyword searches in your master spreadsheet to see if there may be a relationship.

More recently, I used a Frankenstein’s monster combination of free sources, including LinkedIn, Impala, ProPublica, and, as Helen put it in her previous post, “search-string ingenuity,” to find possible connections for a client. As Viola observed, relationship mapping can be time-consuming, but sometimes it really is a matter of digging in all sorts of places to yield a single possible relationship.

Make That Connection: It’s Good for You!

PRSPCT-L is always a fabulous source for tips, tricks, and sometimes simple validation that your fellow researchers often struggle with the same issues. A recent poster indicated a switch back to a more “manual” approach, creating relationship maps for senior leadership to identify. (That sounds a lot like what Viola and Maura recommended above!)

All this talk about relationship mapping should be a good reminder for all of us, both in our workplace and in our “regular” life, of the absolute necessity of creating, fostering, and maintaining strong, lasting relationships. While so many companies have monetized and capitalized upon the idea of making healthy, happy connections, the reality is that many of us continue to struggle with loneliness every single day. It is gratifying to know that my mom, with her long-ago focus on networking and making connections between people, was a bit of an oracle in this particular realm. And so, as we continue to work hard for in our workplaces, let’s also create strong, healthy, and vital relationships for all of us!