The past couple of weeks we’ve focused on tangible how-to skills of map-making. First, downloading and installing a free GIS software. Second, learning to upload and visualize your own data from an excel spreadsheet. Before we go any further in tangible technical skills, I think it would be a great idea to spend a little time thinking about what data, and what maps, are the most useful to collect and create for your humanitarian organization.
1. Do you have a logistics department?
Logistics lends itself wonderfully to mapping. If you have anything to do with logistics, consider mapping any of the following: locations of your warehouses, suppliers, delivery locations, and all possible routes. See if you can plan a more efficient route for your next distribution. What about your waybills? How about mapping a single shipment and how it got distributed over time?
2. Do you have a finance department?
Finance is another story altogether…not such an easy department to help with maps. But how about mapping where your humanitarian cash is being spent? Why not visualize where your aid money is ending up? Or to take a bit of a different perspective, why not take it one step further and map your dollar per beneficiary? Do you have geographic variability in that metric?
3. Do you have a staff safety officer?
Consider making a map of safety incidents across the region where you work. Perhaps come up with a colouring system of green/yellow/red zones to map areas of safe-to-travel, caution needed, or no-go areas.
4. Are you in the senior management team?
Consider how different maps of humanitarian needs and gaps could infuse your next strategic planning session with new questions to ask and ideas to implement. Try mapping massive people movements, results of recent needs questionnaires, or even a who/what/where map of what other organizations are doing on the ground. Make a base map of all your programme operations to include in your next proposal.
5. Are you a project manager?
Are you mapping your daily, weekly, and monthly activities…because if not, maybe you should be. Try to improve your programme implementation just by visualizing what your team does day-to-day.
6. Do you have an M&E team?
If you are concerned about programme quality and beneficiary accountability, you should be mapping results of your M&E so you can start fixing existing problems before they get too big. Your M&E results should be feeding to your project managers and management team so they have a clear picture of successes and failures.
7. What about marketing, communications, and fundraising?
If you’re a communications officer, you should be banging down the door of your GIS team so that they get you the visual maps that back up your latest story.
Those are just a few ideas. What are some of your own ideas for creating useful maps in your organization?