How Relationship Mapping Unlocks Donor Engagement

Giving USA reports that total philanthropic giving rose by 3% from 2023 to 2024, with an estimated $592.50 billion donated to U.S. charities. But at the same time, data from Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) shows declines in the total number of donors by 1.3% year-over-year, as well as a dip in retention rates from 18.3% in 2024 to 18.1%. The generosity of these numbers bodes well for continued fundraising efforts across all sectors (including higher education), but also indicates an increase in competition for those dollars as donor numbers fall. With the economy and wealth landscape undergoing such profound shifts, it’s safe to say the usual playbook for donor engagement isn’t going to work much longer.

At the core, what inspires charitable giving is connection: to a cause, to an institution, and to the people involved. Today, donors are more inundated with sales and marketing messages than at any time in history, making it more difficult to make new connections, or even maintain real connection at all. Fundraisers need a way to cut through the noise and deepen those relationships with their existing donors, as well as more effectively reach and convert new patrons.

Relationship mapping is a revolutionary new framework and tool for not only building deeper connections, but unlocking your network as a source for new prospects and warm introductions — exactly what’s needed to expand your donor base and secure larger gifts. This playbook will explore exactly how to set up this framework and apply it for success in fundraising campaigns for nonprofit, higher ed, and beyond.

5 challenges facing fundraisers today

Economic pressures and evolving donor preferences have made engagement as complex as ever. These are just some of the top challenges keeping fundraisers up at night:

1. Government funding cuts
   In January, the federal government announced a significant number of funding cancellations and freezes to longstanding beneficiaries, leaving many organizations scrambling to fill in the revenue gaps. Many fundraisers were thrown into the deep end of needing immediate major gifts and an expanded donor base. 
2. Growing importance of individual, major gifts
   As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated, competition for donors is only increasing. High net worth donors capable of major gift contributions are a requirement for navigating this time, but fundraisers need an effective way to identify and engage these high-capacity individuals.
3. Increased competition for donor attention
   Today, donors are solicited by countless worthy causes, in addition to all the brands competing for their loyalty. In this environment, generic messages won’t compel a response, let alone get noticed.
4. Greater demand for personalized engagement
   In addition to being overwhelmed with noise, modern donors expect engagement that appeals to their unique interests, history, and capacity. Fundraisers must now demonstrate a real understanding of each prospect just for consideration.
5. Navigating complex networks
   To effectively engage donors, fundraisers need to map out complicated relationship webs between existing contacts and targets —  a nearly impossible project to execute with any efficiency, accuracy, or scalability.

Relationship mapping to the rescue

Overcoming these challenges requires truly creative engagement strategies that take in a full 360 degree view of who each target is. This includes all critical information about their wealth, career, philanthropic history, and more recently: who they’re associated with. That’s where relationship mapping comes in.

Relationship mapping is the strategic process of visually identifying and understanding the influence of key players in your ecosystem, and the pathways of connection between them. This framework moves beyond a simple contact list or hierarchical org chart to reveal the hidden web of professional and personal relationships that can unlock new opportunities.

This type of insight can be transformative to the entire fundraising and donor engagement process. Altrata data already shows relationship mapping is a key ingredient in today’s most successful fundraising campaigns. Relationship mapping enables:

Enhanced visibility
Identify high-capacity donors hidden in your extended network.

Warm introductions
Eliminate cold outreach and connect to prospects through trusted mutual connections, dramatically increasing engagement.

Board network activation
Easily show boardmembers and advocates connections they have to potential donors so you can recruit them to make introductions.

Smarter cultivation
Understanding a prospect’s full affinities, from philanthropic history to board affiliations.

Campaign planning optimization
Data-driven insights reveal the most promising pathways for outreach to take the guesswork out of engagement.

Relationship mapping for nonprofit fundraising: uncovering hidden champions

Nonprofit fundraisers are under more pressure to deliver mission-critical funding than ever, especially amid government funding cuts. High net worth individuals with major giving capacity are also becoming a key ingredient in sustainable fundraising models, but these are the hardest prospects to identify and engage effectively.

Relationship mapping board members, executive leadership, dedicated donors, and volunteers helps fundraising teams systematically uncover high-potential donors and identify the warmest path to an introduction. Many organizations have been able to find major donors that had been hidden within their networks for years, unable to identify them without cutting-edge relationship mapping technology.

For example, boardmembers of the St. Paul & Minnesota Foundation were incredibly well-connected, but struggled to recall beneficial contacts or see how their relationships could support the cause they were so passionate about. SVP Jeremy Wells utilized Altrata’s relationship mapping capabilities to generate a list of boardmembers’ contacts, effectively “priming the pump” for them to identify even more beneficial contacts in their network for breakthrough fundraising opportunities.

For The American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science (ACWIS), relationship mapping was the key to overcoming challenges in international prospecting. Altrata’s people intelligence capabilities helped initially identify and qualify global high net worth individuals, but the relationship mapping tools actually showed fundraisers how to connect to them. After mapping the existing relationships and shared networks between their US-based advocates and the newly identified international prospects, ACWIS replaced ineffective cold calls with warm, credible introductions that dramatically improved engagement and win rates.

Relationship mapping for higher education fundraising: leveraging alumni networks

Institutional advancement teams have a unique donor base that can make identifying prospects much easier than traditional nonprofit fundraising. However, basic profile info about alumni targets still pose challenges to identifying exactly who has major gift giving potential, as well as how to best connect to new prospects.

Alumni networks, and the complex way members are connected, are higher-ed fundraisers’ greatest asset. Relationship mapping gives fundraisers deeper insight into each individual and their connections, highlighting relationships to influential alumni, current trustees, and faculty. This enables highly personalized cultivation, be it facilitating peer introductions, asking existing donors to invite friends to events, or even asking them to act as advocates.

Ultimately, the right people intelligence and relationship mapping partner will do everything for your fundraising team except actually asking for the gift.

Unlock relationship mapping at scale with Altrata

Manually building relationship maps is incredibly labor-intensive and inherently unscalable. Worse, the information compiled may be incomplete, inaccurate, or out of date, rendering all the effort useless. To truly benefit from relationship mapping, you need a people intelligence platform with built-in relationship capabilities.

That’s where Altrata not only shines, but departs from competitors entirely. With our industry-leading relationship mapping capabilities, your fundraising team has access to:

• Hand-curated global data
  Our world-class database  provides verified, out-of-the-box intelligence on ultra-high-net-worth individuals worldwide, including giving histories and wealth indicators.
• Visual mapping tools
  Altrata’s platform transforms complex relationship data into intuitive visuals, making it easy for your entire team to see and act on connection pathways. In fact, our research shows the typical ultra high net worth individual has a direct connection to over 70 other ultra wealthy contacts that other platforms and methods aren’t able to reveal.
• Seamless integrations
  Altrata stands apart in being able to embed directly into your existing workflows thanks to direct integration with leading CRMs (such as Salesforce). The platform not only provides best-in-class people and relationship intelligence, but ensures it’s accessible to gift officers and researchers right where they work every day.

See Altrata in action

Nonprofit and higher ed fundraising is driven by connection more than any type of industry. Your ability to map and leverage relationships is your greatest competitive advantage. Want to transform your donor prospecting and engagement? Schedule a demo to see how our relationship mapping capabilities can unlock the full potential of your network and enhance giving campaigns.