How to use Net-Map in Monitoring and Evaluation

Are you planning or implementing complex projects, that aim at social change? Are you wondering how innovations spread through a given social system? Or maybe connecting people to opportunities or strengthening the networks of the people you work with is an explicit goal of your work?

In all of these cases, Net-Map may be a useful tool to establish a baseline and keep track of the social and network changes that happen, as you do your work. I have recently been asked by a number of colleagues about the use of Net-Map in M&E and my advice to them may be useful for you too.

• Be intentional and get a baseline at the beginning. This might sound rather basic, but I have interacted with a lot of teams who were very excited to Net-Map the impact of their interventions but had nothing to compare it to. If you don’t know how the networks looked before you started, how much can you learn from a snapshot, just one point in time?
• Put hard work into finding the right big question: “Who influences XY?” This is where most mediocre Net-Map studies start, with a question that is not quite on target, often too big (sometimes too small), two or three questions in one or using language that is easy to misunderstand. Pre-test and see if it works. Often at the beginning of a project you may need to start with a broad general landscape question, just to know where you are. Follow it up with a second session that asks a specific question closely linked to your project, so that it will be valid as a baseline.
• Engage a broad enough range of participants, that they will show you your blind spots and give a balanced picture. Don’t just hang out with your friends and group-think. As you do more than one Net-Map over time, for M&E, will you be able to re-assemble the same group or at least a group of similar constellation?
• Don’t just Net-Map. This is a tool that is great for telling you about the HOW and WHY, especially if you have a good interviewer who will dig deep into the qualitative discussion of the map and take good notes of it. However, for the most part Net-Map is not a tool to tell you a lot about the WHAT, to answer whether you have achieved your goals. Ensure to combine it with a solid methodology to evaluate the results achieved. Also, I rarely use Net-Map in a large, quantitative approach – but having it either inform a quantitative evaluation or be informed by it, can enrich both.
• Use Net-Map as a tool for learning, not just for proving. As your project engages with local stakeholders, having a Net-Map landscape in mind can help you be more strategic and flexible and be less surprised by the way they react.

I know a lot of practitioners out there have used Net-Map in M&E context and would love to hear from your examples. Either in the comments or as a guest post.