What is Journey Mapping?
One way to understand your audience
In case you’re not familiar with Journey Mapping, a journey map is essentially a diagram that captures exactly what it says it does — a journey. The essentials of a Journey Map are:
- A journey
- Goal of the journey
- Milestones/Events/Touchpoint
- Placing the moment on an emotional grid
- Noting observations along the way
As a person who is still relatively new to InterVarsity, I decided Journey Mapping would be a great way for me to continue to understand what InterVarsity’s field staff lives are like.
I’ve done journey mapping multiple times at workshops, but this was the first time I did it for real for work.
Setting the Scene
Charis is a Staff friend of mine that I met about a year ago, and I asked her if she’d be interested in journey mapping with me. I told her I’d facilitate the session, all she’d really need to do is share what happened and I would take care of the diagramming.
I first set up the grid on one of the walls that looked something like the picture to the left.
Starting with Fall 2012 when she began planting her chapter, what was the first thing that happened? How was it — good, meh, poor? What did she observe about that milestone?
Getting the story out
As I continue to become more experienced with interviewing and spinning stories out of people, I’ve been struck how both incredibly difficult and simple it is.
- It’s difficult to be quiet and let them tell their story.
- All you need are essentially 4 questions: “So what happened? How did you feel about that? Can you tell me more about this? Any other thoughts?”
So, I asked her those things repeatedly, and we added milestones chronologically by school semester and added observations as they were noticed.
Finished!
Debriefing
One thing InterVarsity is famous for is debriefing. I kid you not — we will debrief how debriefing went.
So I asked her how she though the session went — how did she feel about the experience? In her words:
“Wow — this made me feel really heard. In the midst of planting I often debriefed about pieces of the experience, but this was the first time I stepped back and looked at the entire journey. It was the debrief that I never had.
You can tell them that I am now planting AGAIN and this exercise gave me a chance to review what I’m doing too :)
We should do more journey mapping!”
I agree :)
Digitizing
As epic as our hotel room map was, there was no way I was going to be able to share that with my remote team, so I gathered it up and put it into an accessible digital file.
So why Journey Map?
There’s some obvious benefits to journey mapping — it’s really good to just take a step back and look at the whole thing — and it can be really tough to do that verbally. A visual like this is great for..well debriefing it!
Oftentimes, when we are thinking about how to improve an existing process, sometimes what you have money and space for is incremental improvements — which can be fine! A lot of the observations you make in a map start with these types of incremental improvements.
The biggest reason
But when you’re really looking to change the game and innovate — the real meat you get from a journey map is the themes of the journey. When you can improve a theme, you really change the journey, not just a milestone.
For instance, by looking at the whole map, we could see that she was hindered for an entire year because she didn’t have the right information about her campus. So, a major theme in the new material is going to have to cover understanding the campus.
Shoutouts
Staff
Big thanks to Charis for spending 2 hours with me on a day that was supposed to be a rest day.
Did this help you?
You can contribute to my book fund so that I can keep learning & writing!
Ashley Crutcher is now the Director of Experience Strategy at InterVarsity located in Madison, WI. She tweets at @ashleyspixels and enjoys cuddling with her furkiddos, crocheting/knitting, ringing handbells, and thinking too much about everything.
