Net Mapping with Eva Schiffer
Last week, we had the good fortune to sit down with Eva Schiffer for a day long tutorial on the art of net mapping. We met Eva through Bob, who runs our nascent country chapter program, and he recognized the immense value that network mapping could have for our new chapters.
So, first things first: net mapping is the process of visually representing lines of influence among various actors in a given context. Eva’s process is outlined in greater detail on her IFPRI-hosted site – http://netmap.ifpriblog.org. Let’s run through the exercise Eva guided us on.
- The question: what kind of influence are we looking for? In our case, we went for a broad view and asked “Who influences the Forum’s success in Liberia?” The Forum’s success can be broadly interpreted as setting up a solid, sustainable basis for a country chapter that will result in measurable knowledge transmission across practitioners (yikes).
- The actors: who is involved in this? On colored sticky notes, we put down everyone we could think of – Liberian ministries, our funders, NGOs (international and local), our staff and fellows, various pivotal experts, and on and on.
- Lines of influence: who does what and to whom? We had three basic types of influence – money flows, “meta” information flows relating to the Forum’s activities, and community of practice information flows (this was a bit more theoretical; not there yet!)
- Towers of influences: how much power does each actor really have? We made little stacks of tokens on each actor indicating their relative influence in the outcome. Our funders and fellows had larger piles, while peripheral advisors might only have one or none. I got two!
- Analysis: what does this mean?? It’s great to see your thoughts spatially represented in front of you, but a bit bewildering. Eva guided us through some observations of our map. Some things were obvious, but we reached interesting conclusions on others, realizing that we wanted to shift some influence around and noting connections that we hadn’t really considered. For instance, we’d love for local NGOs to hold more sway, and we need to build in some redundancies so that one person dropping out doesn’t leave us high and dry with regards to access to other groups.
So what will we do with this? Two things really. We’re going to guide our Fellows through this exercise when we’re in Monrovia in a couple weeks. At first this will be a great way to see the kind of people and groups that they can reach out to and draw into our community. I suspect that we’ll learn a great deal about each Fellow’s complementary strengths and help us detail our strategy moving forward. Beyond this, we also have a fantastic M&E tool. In another year, we can run through the drill again, comparing it to the baseline we get this month, and see how the network has grown, who we’ve discovered and who we’ve lost. Hopefully not too much of the latter…
