By Will Schrepferman
CEO, DonorAtlas

How many mission-aligned major gift prospects are just one warm introduction away from your organization?

The answer is probably hundreds–you just have no easy way of knowing which.

The critical relationships are out there: your board chair's former business partner; your treasurer's college roommate who runs a family office; your longtime volunteer's fellow board member at another nonprofit. These connections have been built over decades, and they could unlock transformational gifts. But if you can't see them, they might as well not exist.

The Network You Can't See

Your average board member knows hundreds (if not thousands) of people that they’ve formed relationships with across their professional and personal life. For a ten-person board, that's a network of tens of thousands of possible connections.

The volume of information makes it difficult to find any useful insights manually. Across your whole board, you're looking at so many different data points that could form a “connection”—every job, every school, every board, every membership, every donation.

Buried somewhere in all that information is the insight you need: your board chair's college classmate actually made a gift to a peer organization last year! But finding just one needle in the haystack takes hours of sifting.

This creates familiar dynamics in development shops: when a promising prospect comes up, you ask around. "Does anyone know this person?" Sometimes you get lucky. Usually, you don't. The most organized teams run annual surveys asking board members to list their connections, or they maintain spreadsheets of "who knows who." But these don’t paint the full picture either; they still rely on those board members remembering everyone they know (a daunting task), and the idea of “who knows who” is always changing. People change jobs. They start new businesses. They join new boards. Their kids go to new schools. They vacation in new places.

The connections exist; the problem is that it’s hard to see them when it matters. But the best fundraisers are seeing what others can’t with systematic relationship mapping.

Relationship Mapping That Leads to Introductions

Systematic relationship mapping is about turning your network from something you have to remember into something you can use.

Instead of just starting with a wealthy prospect and hoping you can find someone who knows them, you start with your network—board members, volunteers, donors, staff; any person that you could go to and ask “hey, can you introduce me to John Doe?”

Then, you identify and track your network’s connections. This requires a few things:

●       First, you have to be comprehensive. You need the full scope of who your network knows, and the different ways by which they could know people (where they went to school, and when; where they’ve worked; boards they’ve sat on or sit on; memberships they hold; etc). Don’t just settle for the handful of connections people remember to mention.

●       Second, you have to highlight what matters. Not every connection is meaningful. Two people going to the same massive state school, 30 years apart? Tough to rely on that. Two people cofounding a business 4 years ago? Beyond meaningful.

●       Third, you need to keep information current. Board overlaps change. Giving patterns shift. If your relationship intelligence is a year old, you're making decisions with stale information.

●       Finally, you have to be able to search over connections. When you're building your prospect pipeline, you should be able to filter by connection strength and surface the warmest potential intros first. Then, when you're researching a specific prospect, you should be able to see every possible connection your network has to them.

This is the difference between having a network and being able to use it. Done well, relationship mapping moves you from "who is this person?" to "who can get us there?"

What Systematic Relationship Mapping Can Unlock

When you can actually see and use your network, fundraising starts to feel different.

I worked with a human services organization this week who filtered their 2026 top prospects list by "connected to board members" and discovered 47 major gift prospects they wouldn’t have prioritized otherwise—all with strong introduction paths already in place. Another development team cut their prospect research time by more than half by starting with donors their network already knew. A private school learned that one of their new families had direct connections to a half dozen foundation presidents through previous board service.

Systematic relationship mapping is about deploying your board strategically instead of burning their social and professional capital on asks that lead nowhere. It's about moving faster because you're not spending weeks trying to figure out who knows whom. It's about finding major gift opportunities that were hiding in plain sight.

Where You Can Start Today

You don't need technology to begin building relationship intelligence (but software can certainly help when you need to do it at scale).

Start by identifying the top five connectors in your network who are best positioned to open doors. Manually map their key sources of connections: where they work, where they went to school, what boards they serve on, where they've given before.

Then cross-reference that against a prospect list. Even a simple spreadsheet can reveal patterns: which prospects share an alma mater with your connectors? Who worked at the same companies? Who serves on overlapping boards?

Some organizations are taking this further by building relationship mapping directly into their wealth screening and prospect research, automating what used to require hours of manual research. Technology like DonorAtlas is making it possible to see your entire network at once, automatically map warm introductions, and search for donors you’re connected to in seconds.

In 2026, we’re committed to helping fundraisers make the invisible visible–and raise more with the power of warm introductions.

Will Schrepferman is the co-founder and CEO of DonorAtlas, the donor research platform built from the ground up with AI. Last year, DonorAtlas became the first donor research tool to release fully embedded relationship mapping—helping nonprofits see not just who can give, but who knows whom.