Connection Lists can help you find and understand the links between your constituents and uses the ‘hard’ connections that have been added to constituent profiles.

Connections are reciprocal, so the connection is shown on the profile of each constituent that the connection is between.

To find out more about connections see this article: Connections

For an overview of Lists please see this article Lists Overiew and to find out how to create a new List see this article Creating a new List

Connection List 

The data that is returned in the output is for both sides of the connection, so you will need to use filters to define what the Connection Type is, and therefore which records to display as the connected from or connected to.
 
For example:

Connection Type ‘Employs’ would return the company as the employer (From) and the individual record as the employee ‘To’

Connection Type ‘Employed by’ would return the individual (From ) is employed by the company record ‘To’

You can add in contact details, such as email, address, phone numbers, etc. for both sides of the connection, including financial statistical information.

Data fields

To add data to your output, click on the data selection box to the right of the screen:

Click on the items that you would like to add to your output view. 

Connection Strength

The connection strength indicates how warm the connection is between the main constituent and the Connected To Constituent.

The strength indicator on a profile is a scale of 1-5 (cool to hot) – you can set out your own definitions for the use of this. 

For example,

Director of Company A may know your CEO as they are close friends, so you may want to assign them level 5 (very warm connection)

Whereas Director of Company B may know your CEO as they met recently at a networking lunch, so you may want to assign them level 1 (cool connection) as they are a new connection.

 
There are 4 fields relating to Connection Strength only the following fields are currently used:

1. Connection Strength
2. Connection Strength 1 – records the same details as Connection Strength

Other information available:

• Connection dates – so you can find connections active between date x and date y
• Connection notes
• Prospect research information for both records
• Financial summary details for both sides of the connection

Mailing from a connection List

Whilst you can obtain contact details from a connection List, the contact preferences available in the data selection is only relating to the From person.

Contact preferences are not available for the To connection. To obtain this you will need to download your List with the connected to number and then use the file uploader to add a tag to the constituent profiles.

Once you have added the tag, you can then create a constituent list based on your tag. Download this List and then use Excel to lookup data between your two datasheets.

The Donorfy Academy features a learning course for Lists - enrol here