Using your CPM
We hope that you found the very process of creating your map a useful and revealing activity in itself. Your map is a rich source of information and a tool for design, planning and communication. Now that you have completed your map, you can review its content and consider how you will put it to use.
Review your lovely map
Activity: Review. Take some time to reflect on your map. Here are some prompt questions to get you started:
- What have you learnt about your project or organisation (or what can you learn) from your map ?
- How could your map be useful to you in your role, to other team members, project participants or organisation leadership?
- What do your Change Pathways reveal? How can you use those insights?
- Which elements have the most leverage? i.e. which ones have the most arrows going in and out? What does this mean for your project?
- Have you identified any feedback loops in your project? Will you change anything that you do, to support these loops?
A few other ideas:
- Review your map against project aims and objectives.
- Where is there a lot ‘going on’ in the map? Explore this.
- Does the map reveal any gaps in what the project is doing?
Your map as a tool in MEL design
How could your map inform your impact assessment or MEL plan? (see also ‘Next steps’ lesson)
- Which elements are you already measuring or assessing?
- Which elements or areas of the map are you not assessing?
- Which areas could you start to measure or assess?
- Which parts are most important?
You may want to use your map and the Change Pathways within it to produce a more formal Theory of Change document.
Your map as a tool for communication
Here are some ways that you could use your map to communicate about your project. Which ones will you do?
- Use as a tool for discussion with project team, stakeholders, community, local authorities, other local NGOs
- Communicate plans and progress with funders, potential funders, individual supporters
- Put on your website as an explorable Kumu map
- Include as a PDF or screenshot image in reports or slide shows.
- Use as part of a visioning process with community
- Use as a blueprint or starting point for a similar project in future (for example in another village)
Have you shown this map to anyone? Who from your organisation or community could / should / will you share it with? Will you ask for their input? What would you ask?
The next lesson covers the practicalities of sharing your Kumu map with other people.