Your network & connections
Your network are the people who can make introductions for you. DonorAtlas uses your network to show mutual connections and best paths for an introduction.
Your network are the people who can make introductions for you. DonorAtlas uses your network to show mutual connections and best paths for an introduction.
Your network are the people who can make introductions for your organization — your board, your staff, longtime supporters, well-connected volunteers, or any other custom group of people. Once you set up your network (or multiple networks), DonorAtlas will map their connections to everyone else in the database. Then, whenever you research a prospect, you'll see who already knows them. Below, we'll cover how to build your networks, how we find connections, and where those connections show up.
Your team can have multiple networks — one for your board, another for a gala committee, and so on — each with its own name and color. You'll toggle a network active to control whether it powers your mutual connection recommendations.
Let's do a walkthrough of how to use Your Network:
DonorAtlas is intelligent about the strength of a connection. There's no single criteria that makes someone a strong connection; rather, every connection is weighted on its recency, likelihood, and relevance. Two people who sat on a large board together a decade ago isn't a strong connection, but a smaller board for a longer period of time might be. Colleagues are often strongly connected, but less so as the size of the company grows, their roles differ within the company more, or their tenure overlaps less. DonorAtlas takes all this into account to intelligently show strong connections only when they'll be useful.
The blue Connections bar on a donor profile is a strong connection. Sometimes, there are no strong connections, but instead some weaker connections. In this case, you'll see a smaller grey bar, where you can click See All to see the weaker connections.
There are four ways to add someone to a network: from their profile, within search results, for an entire list, or directly on the page.
Click the button at the top of the donor profile. It's filled in when the donor is already in one of your networks.
Select donors with the checkboxes (or the button), then click the button in the toolbar above the results. This will add all the selected donors to your network.
On the Lists page, every list has a button to add it to your network. Click it to add the whole list to a network in one go. Example: you just imported a spreadsheet of your board contacts — add the whole list to your board's network in one click!
Open a network and click the button to search the entire DonorAtlas database by name and add people directly.
Click in the sidebar. The page has two halves:
To remove someone from a network, click the minus icon next to their name inside the network, or go to their profile and click the button at the top.
Networks are shared across your whole team: anyone can add or remove people, and everyone sees the same connections.
Next up: importing your data — how to bring the donors you already have into DonorAtlas, a whole spreadsheet at a time!