The Path to an Effective Journey Map
A journey map can be an invaluable tool to visualize how someone experiences your museum or membership program.
Empathy—seeing the world as others do and feeling what they feel—is a critical part of human-centered design. And empathic research methods, like journey maps, provide an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of audience needs, barriers, and motivations.
What Is a Journey Map Anyway?
To obtain a holistic view of an experience — be it a visit, a program, a website, or a membership program — it’s necessary to understand the various touchpoints, messages, and interactions involved with that particular experience.
Known as a “customer journey map”* (or just “journey map” for short), the process involves diagramming all of the steps someone goes through when engaging with your museum or a specific aspect of your museum. A journey map can focus on the experience of a single person, a customer segment (e.g., members, website users, or potential visitors), or a composite audience profile such as a specific “persona.”** By helping teams to conceptualize and visualize a customer experience, a journey map allows us to understand the larger context of how, when, and why.
The basic mechanics of any journey map include the following key steps:
Identify and compile audience goals and interactions across channels, touchpoints, time, and space.
Align stakeholders toward a shared objective.
Plot audience goals and interactions in a flowchart, making sure to include a clear beginning and ending point.
Overlay audience thoughts, emotions, and mindsets onto the flowchart to create a narrative.
Highlight key insights, themes, and takeaways.
Journey maps can take many forms, and there is no single right or wrong way to map a customer journey. A journey map might focus on a specific aspect of the customer journey such as the membership renewal process, or a journey map may chart the journey of a visitor from cradle to grave — and anything in-between!
Regardless of the approach, to be effective, a journey map must be exploratory and discovery-based. A well-formed journey map includes a wide range of interactions, sentiments, actions, and pain points. In the journey mapping process, the goal is not to simply reflect a sequence of activities. Rather, the aim is to promote empathy and provide insight into how the person or audience thinks and feels over the course of their specific journey.
Why You Need a Journey Map
Successful, long-term customer relationships are built on empathy. Having a solid understanding audience needs, pain points, and motivations is a prerequisite for being able to design effective strategies and satisfying experiences. Without a journey map, it is very difficult to align teams around solving known problems, identifying hidden pain points, and removing barriers.
Importantly, the process of journey mapping highlights opportunities to break down silos and create a shared vision of the customer experience. For example, if your membership program is in decline (a known problem), a journey map can offer a way to explore different possibilities that can help focus on membership acquisition or improve retention. Similarly, a journey map might help to unearth a breakdown in the online purchase path that is creating friction for visitors who would be interested in becoming members.
The most valuable aspect of a journey map is that it helps museum leaders to shift their perspective from an inside-out viewpoint to one that is outside-in. Journey mapping is not simply a process of transcribing how things work today—it’s an opportunity to imagine a future state. As an empathic research method, a journey map offers a new lens through which we can view the museum experience and prompts us to ask “What if?”
Begin With the End in Mind
In Lewis Carroll's classic children's tale Alice in Wonderland, a lost Alice finds herself in a circuitous conversation with the mischievous Cheshire Cat that goes like this:
ALICE: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
CHESHIRE CAT: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
ALICE: “I don't much care where.”
CHESHIRE CAT: “Then it doesn't matter which way you go.”
ALICE: “…so long as I get somewhere."
CHESHIRE CAT: “Oh, you're sure to do that, if you only walk long enough.”
Journey maps can go wide, examining the overall end-to-end customer experience and analyzing interactions across touchpoints and channels. Or they can go narrow, investigating a singular moment in time or a specific process. They can focus on a distinct two-week period or encapsulate multiple years. They can focus on anything and everything—from increasing visitor satisfaction to boosting member renewal rate.
Before you begin the journey mapping process, ask yourself the following questions:
What is the goal or challenge of the mapping process?
Which journey is the right journey to map?
Who do you want to learn from?
What is the best approach to gathering audience input?
Who should be on your journey mapping team?
Rosie
P.S. If you’d like to dive deeper into topics like Journey Mapping, please join me in the MAP Community’s Membership Innovation Group, where we spotlight exciting work happening in membership programs in cultural organizations around the country.
* While some in the nonprofit field consider the term “customer” a dirty word, the fact is that we are all consumers. We all have needs, goals, and desires. Successful nonprofits are market-driven and understand that they need to have a customer-centric mindset to create value and remain relevant. Feel free to substitute the term “customer” or consumer for member, donor, visitor, user, and audience. They all pay their money (or give their money, or spend their time, or exchange something else of value such as their attention, their data, or their voice) with the expectation that the museum will co-create value with them to help solve their problems and realize their goals.
** A persona involves developing a composite customer segment based on real data and insights that embody the representative personality, values, and mindset of a particular customer. Why use personas? Personas can help to build empathy by painting a vivid picture of a specific customer segment. A well-formed persona will include aspirations, social identities, behaviors, goals, pain points, and attitudes as well as context-specific details such as geography, influencers, and family status. Importantly, a persona should never include assumptions, falsified characterizations, stereotypes, or made-up factoids. Instead, a persona should be based on the rich objective insights obtained through empathic research.
