Best Practices - Affinity for Venture Capital

Create, manage, and close deals faster and more easily with Affinity's dedicated relationship intelligence platform. In this article, we'll go over best practices and features you can leverage to get you/your team up and running in no time.

Overview

1. Getting started with lists
2. Importing data into these lists
3. Getting started with reporting/analytics

Getting started with lists

Upon sign in, you'll notice that Affinity has provided you with a Deals list to begin with. Follow the suggestions below to create more lists from list templates and learn how these lists work best together to optimize your workflow.

If you click on + New List, you'll see other list templates readily available for use.

1. Deals is an organization list that will help you/your team track all deals in one place.
   
   
   1. Instead of creating a new organization list just for your portfolio companies, you can simply filter by all the won deals in the Status column, then create a new saved view by choosing Duplicate this view and labeling it "Portfolio Companies" (see How to leverage saved views within a list).
   2. You can also create board views to visualize your deals by different stages of the pipeline, often used for weekly team meetings across many VC firms.
   3. Keep these relationships warm by setting up reminder triggers to stay in touch if a certain amount of time passes since your last interaction.
      
      
2. Portfolio Founders is a people list that will help you/your team track all the founders of your portfolio companies in one place.
   
   
   1. Once a deal is won in the Deals list, head over to the Portfolio Founders list and add the respective founder(s) to this list.
   2. Keep these relationships warm by setting up reminder triggers to stay in touch if a certain amount of time passes since your last interaction.
      
      
3. VC & Banker Ecosystem is an organization list that will help you/your team track key relationships with other Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Investment Banking firms.
   
   
   1. Use the columns provided (i.e. Firm Type, Sector Focus, Preferred Deal Stage, etc.) to easily filter and narrow down your list based on different interests and attributes.
      
      
4. Fundraising & LPs is an opportunity list that will help you/your team track all your LPs and their respective statuses when it comes to raising capital for different funds over time.
   
   1. Make sure to fill out the default Organizations and People fields for each opportunity with the relevant organization and people - these fields will determine how the other enriched fields get auto-populated with data.
   2. Use the columns provided (i.e. Previous Funds Invested, Prospective Funds, etc.) to keep track of all the different funds each LP has invested in or is interested in.
      
      
5. Talent Pipeline is a people list that consists of all the individuals in your network open to new opportunities in your portfolio companies.
   
   1. Keep these relationships warm by setting up reminder triggers to stay in touch if a certain amount of time passes since your last interaction.
      
      
6. Newsletter is a people list that consists of individuals that have opted in to receive monthly/quarterly newsletters.
   
   1. You can leverage Affinity's bulk email feature and email templates feature to bulk-send personalized emails to each person on this list.
   2. If you're on the Premium or Enterprise tier and also use Mailchimp for your newsletters, you can also leverage Affinity's native integration with Mailchimp so that every person added to this list gets automatically added to the Mailchimp audience of your choice.

Importing data into these lists

If you're migrating data from another platform and have this data in the form of Excel/CSV files, you can leverage Affinity's data importer to quickly bring this data into your lists. We highly encourage you to review these 3 articles/videos in sequential order:

1. Cleaning up your data before importing into Affinity
2. How to import your data into Affinity
3. Viewing your data import history
   Note:If you have Excel/CSV files full of notes that you'd like to import into Affinity, please check out: How to import notes into Affinity.

Getting started with reporting/analytics

Once you have your lists filled with the proper data, you can leverage our Basic Reporting feature (available to all Affinity customers) to access pre-made reports/visualizations of your data.

1. Getting started with Basic Reporting
2. Basic Reporting - List Summary Reports
3. Basic Reporting - Team Activity Reports
4. Basic Reporting - Funnel Analysis Reports
5. Basic Reporting - Opportunities Reports

If you have access to Affinity Analytics (only available to Premium and Enterprise customers), you can start creating more robust dashboards containing key performance metrics and custom visualizations:

1. Getting started with Affinity Analytics
2. Affinity Analytics - List Summary Reports
3. Affinity Analytics - Team Activity Reports
4. Affinity Analytics - Funnel Analysis Reports
5. Get notified when certain metrics/thresholds are met using Affinity Analytics alerts.