How R/GA helps fuel the growth of its companies with Affinity

Introduction

R/GA Ventures is a corporate venture fund launched in 2014 by R/GA, an award-winning digital agency. By capitalizing on strong corporate partnerships and knowledge acquired from working with leaders such as the LA Dodgers and Snap Inc., R/GA Ventures has helped hundreds of startups build their brands and succeed in crowded markets.

Prior to Affinity, R/GA had no way to automatically track activity including meetings, email and calendars in one place to help teams prioritize what matters most to the business as well as manage deal flow and pipeline. With Affinity, the investing teams have context on who they are working with to make better investment decisions.

Challenge

R/GA is laser-focused on helping its clients and partners increase innovation and market traction. In order to connect its companies with the right experts to fuel growth, R/GA Ventures leverages its vast network, which spans across the world and involves not just R/GA, but all of its clients and customers.

R/GA was struggling to manage its deal pipeline and contact information in one system. Tracking information about the firm’s business network across email and calendars was siloed and required manual data entry by the investment teams. R/GA needed a solution to help mitigate this manual work and provide visibility across its network to ensure better decision making. 

Solution

Affinity has empowered R/GA Ventures to gain a deeper understanding of its network. Affinity’s People Dashboard provides the global team with a holistic view of its network, enabling it to effectively source new relationships in existing and emerging networks. The entire team has complete visibility into where relationships have transpired and where future opportunities exist. 

Affinity’s filters enable the team to understand the composition of its network at a granular level. Using filters, the team is able to effectively track deal flow by location, industry, sector, and more, and ensure that it is sufficiently diversified and primed for continued growth. “Affinity gives us a view into a place that a lot of people don’t have,” says Dylan Boyd, Director of New Programs Development at R/GA Ventures.

Affinity’s privacy safeguards were especially fundamental to R/GA Ventures’ decision to adopt Affinity. As a corporate venture fund that is involved in sensitive discussions, the ability to have public visibility into where relationships exist but, at the same time, sufficient privacy when it comes to the specifics of the conversations is critical.

Results

With Affinity, the investing teams have context on who they are working with to make better investment decisions. The team can now take advantage of these benefits:

• Warmer path to the introduction to create better opportunities or close a deal
• Better understanding of the entire network –  founder, buyer, or seller with deep, enriched data
• Firm-wide deal-making improvements with relationship and pipeline analytics
• Confidence in privacy safeguards for information sharing

As the team expands its footprint, it will continue to turn to Affinity as a key means of maintaining a competitive advantage, all with the confidence that its data is protected.