Case Study: Finding the Hidden Network

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash‍ ‍

Working on behalf of a mission-driven nonprofit, ABM for Good began, as always, with the companies – not the people – to build a list of targets with whom the nonprofit could potentially build strategic, sustainable partnerships.

After multiple rounds of scoring and refinement, we had a target list of organizations whose actual strategic priorities, not just their public CSR language, created a genuine reason to engage with the client's mission.

We then searched for the relevant roles at those companies. AI analysis of the broader professional activities, affiliations, and relationships of those individuals revealed something a conventional title search would have missed entirely: fifteen of the executives were all active members of the same specialized professional working group – a voluntary, selective community organized around a specific aspect of the client's mission area. This is not a large trade association that anyone joins by default. It is a community people seek out because they're genuinely committed.

More importantly, the analysis identified one individual who had founded and led the group. That person became the clear priority for squencing outreach. This person was not just a high-value target in isolation, but the natural entry point for building credibility with the other fourteen executives also in the group. Initial outreach could reference the shared professional work directly – not as a cold pitch, but as a substantive conversation between people working on the same problem from different angles.

On a separate engagement focused on a different mission area and a completely different industry, AI surfaced a comparable structure: a small cohort of target executives who are all active participants in the same international technical standards committee. Again, this shared affiliation was invisible to a title search. And again, it identified both the right entry point and the right conversation opener.

In both cases, AI analysis did not change who was on the target list. Rather, it changed what we knew about them – and gave the outreach a coherence and credibility that cold-calling a flat list of names never could.