Find the Hidden Influencers in Your File

Most plans still orbit transactions: who gave, how much, and when. Useful, but incomplete. What your RFM cells don’t show is the person whose action quietly prompts three more people to give. When budgets are tight, missing that ripple means missed revenue. 

SimioCloud Event Champions Model adds the dimension you need. It appends two attributes to the donor records you already use in the SimioCloud platform — Influence: how reliably someone’s action leads others to respond, and Receptivity: how likely someone is to respond when exposed to a peer’s action. The Event Champions Model doesn’t replace your current segmentation or models; it enhances them, allowing you to recruit the right captains, focus outreach where it matters, and earn both direct gifts and the gifts influenced by the people who move others. 

The Challenge You Already Feel 

You do smart targeting and still watch certain peer efforts outperform expectations. Traditional reporting credits the direct donor and misses the upstream nudge that made a moment possible. That gap makes captain recruitment a guessing game, creative choices uneven, and reinvestment dependent on what’s visible instead of what’s effective. In most peer-to-peer programs, growth depends on the strength of your event champions — the people who motivate peers to give, join, or show up. Yet identifying them has long relied on instinct rather than data. 

A Sample Test Case 

Let’s say you’re the development director at a children’s hospital planning a fall walk to fund a new pediatric imaging suite. In past years, you recruited team captains from loyal donors and active volunteers —people you know and trust. Yet, growth has stalled.  

This year, you use Event Champions Model to find new champions — individuals whose influence extends beyond their own giving. Because the Event Champions Model lives inside SimioCloud and outputs compliance-safe fields (donor IDs), nothing about your database or channels has to change. 

You begin with selection. Instead of defaulting to the largest givers, you sort potential captains by Influence and invite a mix of parents, volunteers, and mid-level donors whose past actions tend to move others. For outreach, you stage your first wave to those with higher receptivity: the people most likely to join when a captain acts. Then follow with story-led content for broader community names who need more time. 

Your creative shifts from generic encouragement to precise cues that drive peer behavior: visible progress, named recognition, simple first steps. You finally see the ripple you’ve always suspected. 

The desired result in this fictional example is typical of what we see when influence is considered. It isn’t a single “whale.” It’s a handful of steady champions whose teams bring in friends-of-friends. Participation grows, average gift holds, and your debrief shows which leaders and messages generated the most total value. Those captains become your priority invites for next spring’s gala committee. 

What Changes in Your Day-to-Day 

With Influence and Receptivity in the file, champion recruitment becomes a selection exercise, not guesswork. You can build stronger event champions and champion networks, test which champions inspire the most lift, and re-engage top performers year-over-year. Your strategy gets clearer because you know where to press for action and where to build comfort first.  

Under the hood, the Event Champions Model is grounded in network-based behavioral modeling built from donation data — not social media engagement or self-reported signals. The scoring can be calibrated to your program type (peer-to-peer, acquisition, or retention), and the attributes sit alongside your existing SimioCloud segments and model scores. 

How to Start Without Overhauling Anything 

Choose one initiative. Perhaps your GivingTuesday push, a membership drive, or that fall walk. Append Event Champions Model, recruit a pilot set of high-influence leaders, and stage the first wave to the high-receptivity audiences around them. During the effort, capture both direct gifts and those influenced by the champion’s activity over a defined window. Afterward, reinvest in the leaders and messages that produced the most total value. You’ll learn quickly about who catalyzes generosity, and which audiences move when they do. Even a small pilot anchored around a single event champions cohort will reveal which networks drive the biggest ripple. You’ll start to see not just who gives — but who gives others a reason to.