Maximizing Impact
How and Why to Use Impact Mapping for Your Membership Community
Summary
Impact mapping is a strategy technique that helps teams build products that make a difference. It's particularly valuable for associations looking to create meaningful impact for their members while balancing long-term aims with the chaos of navigating the day-to-day.
Like all great product development, impact mapping is member-centric. We don’t create things just to create things. We are intentional because we empathize and build ongoing relationships with our communities. We understand their pain points, wants, needs, and opportunities. This not only provides key insights on what to build, it fosters durable belonging and connection.
I lead the product community, a product development learning community designed specifically for associations. Let’s compare ideas and build something great.
What is Impact Mapping?
“Nonprofits neither supply goods or services nor controls. Its product is neither a pair of shoes nor effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being.”
Peter Drucker
Our mantra in the product community is to create deep and long-lasting relationships with our members. The more we know through continuous discovery, the more we can anticipate and build what members need: to both serve and enhance their professional journeys.
Impact mapping is a visual, collaborative planning method created by Gojko Adzic that connects business goals to deliverables through a map of relationships. The power of the model focuses on broad-based behavior change. We can use it for our product development and member engagement efforts, essentially to get better at making and delivering what members want so they are ready to contribute. Impact mapping answers four key questions:
WHY? - Why are we doing this? What business goal are we trying to achieve?
WHO? - Who can help us achieve this goal?
HOW? - How should behavior change?
WHAT? - What can we do to support the required impacts? What is the outcome or deliverable?
The resulting map forms a horizontal visualization that connects your product deliverables directly to business objectives. How should we utilize impact mapping? It is valuable in these circumstances: starting new initiatives where you need to align stakeholders, prioritizing features for maximum impact, facing resource constraints and needing to focus efforts, enhancing membership value or engagement, during strategic planning cycles, or determining when a digital transformation needs clear direction. Impact mapping is as powerful as it is straightforward. Let’s see how it works in practice.
How it Works in Practice
“True velocity does not come from lone brilliance but from a shared mindset where the group is constantly learning and improving.”
Alvis Ng
The power of impact mapping is that it helps us determine what’s most important. Asking the right questions can help us determine what should be achieved and why. Impact mapping requires we embrace impact or a higher order of engagement that pushes us to realize important outcomes. In this way, impact mapping is one part of a three step journey:
Scan for impact — Understanding the context, understanding members, identifying the right problems, exploring risks, possible harms, and opportunities.
Map the impact — Aligning on impact and outcomes, identifying assumptions, connecting what we do with what our member community wants.
Measure the impact — Positioning to measure what matters, gathering resources and readying infrastructure to hit our shared targets.
As a tool and process, impact mapping can bring clarity and structure to purpose-driven teams looking to identify and measure the long term value of the services they deliver. Let’s look at an example of how to use impact mapping to help increase member retention by enhancing engagement. A key point: the best way to utilize impact mapping is in a cross-functional team of 4-5 with representation from membership, learning, technology, marketing, or events.
WHY? - Increase member retention by 15% in the next fiscal year
WHO? (Actors who can influence this goal):
Current members
Association staff
Committee volunteers
Industry partners
HOW? (Impacts/behavior changes needed):
Current members: Engage more frequently with association resources
Staff: Provide more personalized support to members
Volunteers: Create more valuable content
Partners: Offer exclusive benefits to members
WHAT? (Deliverables that support these impacts):
For members to engage more:
Mobile-responsive member portal with personalized dashboard
Simplified access to continuing education resources
Social networking features to connect with peers
For staff to provide personalized support:
Member activity analytics dashboard
Automated renewal reminders with personalized value statements
Streamlined help request system
For volunteers to create content:
Content contribution platform with templates
Recognition program for content creators
Collaborative workspace for committees
For partners to offer benefits:
Partner portal for managing exclusive offers
Integration with member authentication for seamless access
Analytics on benefit utilization
This map would help the association prioritize which features to develop based on their potential impact on member retention, creating a strategic roadmap for product development that stays aligned with the core business goal and a community looking for professional development, networking, and deep belonging.
We Create Value for People
“Identify areas where tech can step in to handle routine tasks, and let your team focus on the high-impact, human aspects of their work.”
Marc Benioff
We develop plans to prepare for events, publish content, or facilitate learning. These plans are often shopping lists of features, without the context for why such things are important. Without a clear mapping of deliverables to business objectives – and a justification of that mapping through impacts that need to be supported – it is difficult to make the case why we should or shouldn’t invest in a particular solution.
The power of impact mapping comes from its simplicity and overt focus on members hungry for great value. Impact mapping surfaces our assumptions in order to help us pinpoint our true north and pushes us to focus on how we’re going to get there as a community.
I lead the product community; we are a learning community because we believe great relationships help us create the value our members want. Remember, product-led growth fuels connection. Join the product community and flip your destiny.
About the Author
James Young is founder and chief learning officer of the product community®. Jim is an engaging trainer and leading thinker in the worlds of associations, learning communities, and product development. Prior to starting the product community®, Jim served as Chief Learning Officer at both the American College of Chest Physicians and the Society of College and University Planning. Please contact me for a conversation: james@productcommunity.us