All of the seven dimensions describe the funder. Proximity is exclusively about the funder's relationship to you. Specifically: are they already a direct donor, or are they an upstream prospect connected to your file by one, two, or three degrees of giving? Proximity is the dimension that tells your team whether the right next move is stewardship, qualification, or introduction.
The four levels Aprize tracks
Proximity is encoded as a level number. Level -1 is the direct giving relationship: a donor who gave to your organization directly. Level -2 is a giving-network neighbor: a funder who has not given to you but who has given to organizations that share donors with you. Level -3 and Level -4 extend the chain further. Each step out adds one degree of separation in the public-record giving flow.
The numbering is borrowed from network-analysis convention: the closer to zero, the closer to your organization. A Level -1 funder is actively in your file. A Level -4 funder is four giving relationships removed and surfaces only because the cumulative pattern of their giving overlaps your peer ecosystem strongly enough to merit attention.
Why Proximity changes the engagement strategy
The same Capacity, Affinity, and Ranking scores imply very different next moves at different Proximity levels. A direct donor with a strong Ranking belongs in active cultivation by an assigned gift officer. The same scores at Level -2 mean qualification: who introduces you, what is the warm pathway in, which board member or current donor sits at the bridge between this funder and your work?
At Level -3 and -4, the move is rarely a direct ask. It is positioning: showing up at the conferences this funder attends, being legible in the publications they read, building the kind of public profile that makes them more likely to recognize your name when a peer mentions you. Lilly Family School of Philanthropy research consistently finds that peer-to-peer signaling is among the strongest predictors of new institutional giving relationships. Proximity tells you which prospects are close enough that a direct ask is plausible, and which require the slower work of positioning first.
The reason most prospect lists go stale
Most prospect-research output is flat. A list of 200 names with capacity ratings does not distinguish between the household that has already attended a peer organization's gala and the household that has never written a check in your sector. Without Proximity, your gift officers default to working the names whose contact information is easiest to find, which is rarely the same set as the names with the strongest underlying signal.
Aprize encodes Proximity explicitly so prospect lists can be filtered to the universe a gift officer can actually move on this quarter. A Level -2 prospect with a known board introduction is a different work item from a Level -4 prospect requiring a year of relationship-building. Treating them as the same line item in a list guarantees one of them gets neglected.
What Proximity is not
Proximity is not a measure of relationship strength inside your organization. A Level -1 donor who has not been contacted in three years is at high risk of attrition; a Level -2 prospect with a strong board introduction may be more accessible. Proximity tells you what the public record can see; the relationship layer that lives in your CRM is what makes Proximity actionable.
Proximity is also not static. As donors give and stop giving, as foundations rotate program priorities, as your own program profile shifts, the giving-network distance to a given funder changes. Aprize re-computes Proximity each cycle from the current public-record data, so the level numbers reflect the current network rather than a snapshot frozen at engagement start.
Closing the series
Capacity, Affinity, Ranking, Classification, Favor, Trend, and Proximity are deliberately the seven dimensions Aprize chose. Other frameworks slice the problem differently. We have settled on these seven because they are the smallest set that, together, answer the four questions a development director has to answer every Monday morning: Who could give? Who is most aligned with us? Who should I work first? And how do I get to them?
If a future dimension earns its place by answering a question these seven cannot, we will add it. Until then, we are sticking with seven.