How Relationship Mapping Helps Nonprofits Find Donors

For businesses in the nonprofit industry that rely on donor funding, one of the biggest hurdles can be finding donors in the first place. While your institution may have a set group of reliable givers, it’s always important to be generating more and more donor prospects to grow and maintain revenue.

But most donors aren’t found with a simple Google search or Instagram post. Nonprofits rely on various methods that help them identify future donors, and one crucial tool is relationship mapping. Here’s everything you need to know about the practice of relationship mapping, including why it’s so helpful for nonprofits.

What is relationship mapping?

Good news: it’s pretty easy to infer what relationship mapping for nonprofits is because it’s exactly what it sounds like. This practice means literally mapping out various relationships to display the interconnectedness of a network.

Relationship mapping displays connections between individuals, organizations, and causes, to depict who might be the closest to a given mission, company, or donor. This has many benefits for the organization creating the map: a relational map can identify missed opportunities and missed connections and show a pathway toward reaching out to new people and organizations.

The importance of relationship mapping for donor prospecting

Overall, this practice is a crucial part of donor prospecting. Organizations need to consistently be on the lookout for suitable prospective donors through prospect research so that they can grow incoming donations, and relationship mapping helps them identify potential givers with existing connections to the organization.

In this way, an organization can leverage those relationships for warm introductions and referrals. A cold call or email asking for a donation is more likely to be successful if it is personalized or comes by way of a trusted mutual connection, so this leads to a better rate of donor response. By mapping out relationships, it’s also possible to uncover hidden connections or untapped networks, showing people and companies that the organization might have otherwise overlooked.

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Key Steps for implementing Relationship Mapping

Of course, there is no way to make a relationship map without knowing all an organization’s current relationships. Here’s how to get started.

Gather data

The first step to this process is gathering data from various sources, like donor databases, social media, and public records, to identify current and past relationships. Consider an arts nonprofit organization with a big Instagram presence: maybe a leader in the tech industry follows the organization on Instagram but has never given money. Listing out followers would help the company realize this potential donor so they can gear their Instagram outreach in a more successful way.

Create data visualizations

The next step is to place that collected data into a chart to be able to visualize the actual connections. This could include making a large web or cloud with lines between names indicating the type of relationship connecting each point. From there, you can analyze these connections, seeing which areas are more or less interconnected.

Identify relationships

Finally, using the mapped data, you can identify relationships that should be invested into, like prospective donors who are connected to the organization through their network but have not yet donated. You should then develop strategies for leveraging these connections to increase donor funding in the long run.

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Relationship mapping in the real world

While the hypothetical benefits of relationship mapping are certainly enchanting, there are plenty of real-world case studies that show this practice lives up to its promises. In a study published by The Allegiance Group, fundraisers at Dartmouth College said that relationship mapping was imperative for their success.

In this case, employees of the Dartmouth Advancement office made a map of alumni, showing all the connections between strong donors to other Dartmouth alumni who had not yet donated. They noted that the alumni who had not yet donated were more likely to take a call from their old college friends than they were to answer a cold call from someone in the Advancement office.

And this approach showed real success; officials told The Allegiance Group that they saw “immediate impact during strategy sessions with [their] different officers in highlighting where we can begin leveraging relationships.” Ultimately, the relationship map aided in their major goal to raise $250 million.

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Best practices for relationship mapping

One of the most important strategies for using donor mapping is to view it as an ongoing tool, not simply a one-time thing. Organizations should plan to integrate this strategy into all overall donor prospecting, meaning they will update and refine the relationship map consistently and check in regularly. This will help optimize all donor prospect searches and make the most use of the time spent mapping out relationships.

It’s also key to maintain data privacy and ethical considerations when approaching a relationship map. Make sure that your data is kept in a secure place, just like your donor profiles and correspondences are, so that you continue to foster trust with all donors and prospects.

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Start your Relationship Mapping with Nexis® for Nonprofits

There are myriad benefits of relationship mapping for nonprofits. The products within Nexis for Nonprofits help you find prospective donors through relationship mapping and verify those prospects to make sure they are the right fit for your organization. 

For more information on how to make the most out of data to take your fundraising to the next level, download our e-book "A Practical Guide to Becoming a Data Driven Nonprofit".