Connections: Your Network and Found Connections

Your Network is an input: you tell Dataro who your board members, staff, volunteers, and personal contacts are.

Found Connections is an output: ProspectAI looks for paths between a prospect and either the people in Your Network or the prospect's own discovered contacts, then shows you who could make an introduction.

Your Network does nothing until there are people in it, so getting your friendly contacts loaded is one of the first things to do in your first week with ProspectAI, and it is the step teams most often skip.

Your Network is the set of people you could comfortably ask for an introduction. In practice that means board members, senior staff, long-standing volunteers, committee members, and your own professional contacts.

Your Network is not built automatically. You build it yourself, or Dataro's team can load your board members for you during onboarding. Each contact appears as a card with their location and bio, and once ProspectAI has found paths through them, a link showing how many intro paths they account for.

That intro path count is useful in its own right. A board member who sits on three paths into your top prospects is worth more to you than one who sits on none, and you would not otherwise know.

Found Connections is generated during research. When ProspectAI researches a prospect, it looks for relationships between that person and two groups:

• People in Your Network. These are the actionable ones, because you already know who to ask.
• The prospect's own contacts discovered during research. Useful for understanding who a prospect moves among, even where you have no route in yet.

Each connection carries a strength rating of Strong, Moderate, or Light. Use it for triage rather than as a verdict. A Strong connection is worth raising with the person in question, while a Light one should be verified before you mention it to anybody.

Note: We recommend that you verify a path before acting on it. The connection tells you a relationship probably exists, but only the person you are asking can tell you whether it is close enough to use.

Found Connections shows you when the same person appears across several of your prospects. For example, four of your top ten prospects may all connect back to the same board member. Taken together, those four paths are worth a single conversation with that board member about everyone they are well placed to introduce you to, rather than four separate requests.

We recommend building Your Network out reasonably fully rather than adding contacts as you go, because a hub only appears if that person is already in your network.

Found Connections looks for paths between a prospect and the people you have told Dataro you know. If that list is empty, there is nothing to match against, so the panel comes back with little or nothing in it.

There is no error message to tell you what is wrong. A major gift officer can research ten prospects, see no useful introductions, and conclude that the connections feature is not worth checking, when the paths would have been there had the contact list been uploaded first.

The order therefore matters: add your contacts first, then research prospects.

We recommend starting with your board, for three reasons. Board members are already documented somewhere, usually in a governance file or on your website, so you are not building a list from scratch. They tend to have the widest reach, because they are networked into the circles your major gift prospects move in. And there are usually between eight and twenty of them, so adding them is a single sitting rather than a project.

Once that is done, you have a working network and you can extend it as you go.

To add contacts to Your Network:

1. Open ProspectAI from the sidebar at https://app.dataro.io/v3, then go to Your Network.
2. Click + Add to your network.
3. Add contacts either one at a time, or contact your CSM to add a whole group at once.

To decide whether someone belongs in Your Network, ask whether you would be comfortable asking that person for an introduction. If you would, add them. If it would be awkward, leave them out, because a path you will not use adds nothing.

As your team researches prospects, ProspectAI looks for routes through the contacts you have added, and Found Connections fills in on its own, with nothing further to manage. This is why we recommend adding contacts early: every prospect researched after the upload can be matched back to your contacts.

Do I have to build Your Network for Found Connections to work at all?

Found Connections will still show the prospect's own discovered contacts, which tells you who they move among. However, the connections you can act on are the ones that run through people you know, and those only appear once those people are in Your Network. You can add them yourself, or ask your CSM to have Dataro's team load your board members during onboarding.

What exactly does Strong mean?

It is a relative measure of how substantial the evidence for a relationship is, rather than a verified score. Use it to decide what to look at first. A Strong connection is worth raising with the contact directly, while a Light one is worth checking before you raise it.

Can I see everyone connected to one board member?

Yes. Open the contact in Your Network and use the intro paths link on their card. That is the view to bring to a meeting with that person.

Is Found Connections part of our subscription?

If you have ProspectAI, yes. It is switched on for all ProspectAI customers, though it needs contacts in Your Network before it can show you paths you can act on.

How many contacts do we need before this is useful?

A board list is enough to start seeing paths. There is no threshold to clear, but a network of five is thin and a network of forty is considerably better, because reach grows as you add people who are themselves well connected.

We do not have a clean board list. What now?

Use whatever you have, even if it is only names and a rough location. You can add contacts one at a time and improve the entries later. A partial network is more useful than an empty one.

Does adding contacts to Your Network cost credits?

No. Building and maintaining Your Network is free.

Who should own this at our organization?

Whoever holds the board relationship, usually a development director or head of philanthropy. It needs someone with the standing to ask for the list and the judgment to decide who belongs in it.