November 17, 2014 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Melody Song knows a lot about how the movers and shakers of her city are connected.
A senior development officer at the Calgary Zoo, Ms. Song researched the social and professional relationships of 35 people, a combination of board members and big donors. Then, using open-source software, she put the information together to create a complex, searchable map that shows the links among more than 2,800 individuals and organizations.
“In Calgary, our business community is relatively small,” says Ms. Song. “If someone gives me a name, I look into my database and it’s there, and I immediately can create a map and see who he knows.”
Like a growing number of nonprofits, the zoo uses relationship mapping to identify new potential donors and people in the organization’s network who can make introductions to them. The group also uses the information to spot well-connected people who would make good board members or campaign volunteers.
Ms. Song decided to take a do-it-yourself approach, because when she started the project several years ago, she wasn’t happy with the leading relationship databases’ coverage of Calgary.
“We gave them a name of someone who’s very well known here as a philanthropist, and they weren’t even there,” she says.
A ‘Big, Messy Knot’
Doing everything in-house makes for relationship maps that are more comprehensive and customizable, notes Ms. Song. But, she says, it’s a lot of work.
The 35 relationship maps took six to eight hours of research each. And because the software she uses, NodeXL, is a tool that works with Excel, it’s more difficult to share the maps she creates than if she were using a web-based relationship database like Prospect Visual or Relationship Science.
When Ms. Song visualizes all the people and organizations in the zoo’s relationship database, “it’s just a big, messy knot on the screen.”
To create a relationship map for potential donor John Doe, Ms. Song looks up his name in the Excel spreadsheet. John Doe then lights up on the attached NodeXL map as a red dot. Ms. Song can click on the dot and extract a map for him, selecting how many degrees of relationships to include—say, all of his connections and then all of those people’s acquaintances.
She can also label each of the people with more description and detail, something that’s not possible on the jumbled overall map.
“The submap function is the best function,” she says. “Without that, I can’t do anything. It’s just a big knot.”
