Collaborative, Participatory & Empowerment Evaluation
Carly Levitz, MPH (she/her/hers)
Evaluation and Learning Associate
Center for Community Health and Evaluation
Seattle, Washington, United States
Emily Bourcier, MPH, MHA
Evaluation Division Manager
Center for Community Health and Evaluation
Seattle, Washington, United States
Location: White River Ballroom G
Abstract Information: Journey mapping allows evaluators to step back in a variety of situations: you think you may know the problems, challenges, and opportunities in a program or evaluation design, but through journey mapping, you gather information more broadly from people in story form to understand context and range of opportunities. Journey mapping fully documents a stakeholder’s experience or what they believe an ideal experience could be. It does this by grounding the stakeholder in key time points and understanding how they feel about and interact with people and processes at those times. Journey mapping can help reframe the problem and uncover new ways of understanding the opportunities. Evaluators can use journey mapping to bring stakeholder voice to the foreground, and to tell a visual story of challenges, successes, and opportunities for programmatic interventions. We will demonstrate two uses of journey mapping, both of which incorporate additional qualitative methods such as focus groups, along with other human-centered design methods such as Interviewing with Empathy and Draw Your Experience. Each demonstration will include sharing protocols and other materials used in the journey mapping process. The examples demonstrate how evaluators can use journey mapping to understand context through learning about, retelling, and validating stakeholders’ stories. Session attendees will learn the versatility of journey maps through seeing an example where the journey map was the final product and where the journey map was the starting point, and in a clinical program evaluation setting and a cross-site multisector initiative setting.
Relevance Statement: Journey mapping allows the evaluator to step back in a variety of situations: you think you may know the problems, challenges, and opportunities in a program or evaluation design, but through journey mapping, you will gather information more broadly from people in story form to understand context and range of opportunities. Journey mapping fully documents a stakeholder’s experience or what they believe an ideal experience could be. It does this by grounding the stakeholder in key time points and understanding how they feel about and interact with people and processes at those times. Journey mapping can help reframe the problem and uncover new ways of understanding the opportunities. Evaluators can use journey mapping to bring stakeholder voice to the foreground, and to tell a visual story of challenges, successes, and opportunities for programmatic interventions. Journey maps contain individuals’ stories that can be both the end goal and part of a process to learn more. We will demonstrate two uses of journey mapping, both of which incorporate additional qualitative methods. • In a formative evaluation of a program to improve primary care for patients with persistent pain, the journey map was the end goal to support program improvement. The visual representation of patients’ stories helped the program team determine where to focus and prioritize improvement efforts in their intervention and pursue policy change. A secondary outcome from the journey map was to inform future evaluation data collection efforts. The process included human-centered design methods such as Interviewing with Empathy, Draw Your Experience, and a more traditional focus group. The final product was designed by a graphic designer after patients reviewed drafts. • An evaluation team used journey mapping to understand team members’ experience on a project mid-course as part of a larger process to strengthen the evaluation’s effectiveness. Journey mapping was one step in a larger design process to find and prioritize an area for improvement in the evaluation approach. A formal journey map was not created after the mapping exercise on flip-chart paper. Instead, the exercise was followed by other methods of prioritization and solution-generation, such as Dot Voting and How Might We. The evaluation design process led to changes such as how the evaluation team interacted with key stakeholders involved in the project. This project evaluated a cross-site multisector collaboration to promote community-informed development that prioritizes racial equity, health, and climate resilience. The demonstrations will include protocols and other materials used in the data collection and synthesis processes. Both examples demonstrate how evaluators can use journey mapping to understand context through learning about, retelling, and validating stakeholders’ stories. Session attendees will learn the versatility of journey maps through seeing an example where the journey map was the final product and where the journey map was the starting point, and in a clinical program evaluation setting and a cross-site multisector initiative setting.