Using Empathy Maps to Foster Understanding
We help mission-driven organizations positively impact communities, and empathy mapping is one of our favorite tools. If you’re looking for a way to better understand your clients, stakeholders, or community, read on.
What is empathy mapping?
Think of empathy mapping as a way to gain better insights into how people might think, feel, see, say/do, and much more. While frameworks vary, the empathy map engages participants to envision:
What people think & feel
How they receive information (Hear)
How they perceive situations (See)
How and what they communicate outwardly (Say and do), and
What they stand to gain and lose from a project/project.
When or why use empathy mapping?
This tool helps us begin to scratch the surface in introducing empathy and community-focused thinking into the facilitation and decision-making process. It provides a shortcut when folks balk at the idea of shared understanding or a prolonged process and helps resistant groups begin to build the muscles they need to engage in truly community-centered practices.
The Empathy Map is a tool. Just like all of the unused apps on your phone, having the tool doesn’t “solve for x” - the goals and process outputs still require skillful facilitation.
When facilitating with groups of varying power dynamics we find it best to have folks think and populate maps on their own before discussing findings and building a collaborative map.
Empathy Maps are a helpful framework for groups to debrief their reaction to document reviews or results. It can foster thoughtful conversation about community needs, feelings, and experiences and help improve decision-making within those contexts.