Reflection-Mind Mapping

Challenge When I was in college, I was part of a consulting group which focuses on supporting NGOs. I was assigned to the group of 4 people which  consults an NGO that helps African mixed kids. This NGO holds community events each weekend for kids and parents with African roots and about 15 families engage each week. Events are always successful, they have fun but the NGO itself has serious financial problems and the NGO leader was willing to collect more donations to continue the activity. So my challenge was to solve how to raise more funds for this NGO.

Selection We selected a “Mind Mapping” tool to find the main cause of the problem and it was really effective to build up hypotheses on how to solve them. Before adopting a mind mapping tool, we conducted some interviews and collected data. We had some meetings with the leader and a financial executive, kids and parents who are involved in this activity, and  donors. We had so much information communicating with them,so the next step was to think about which information we should focus on. Mind mapping is a tool for finding coherent stories of hypotheses so it was a good tool for us after all these interviews and didn’t know what to focus on.

Application We lay out all the insights from the interviews on a mind mapping tool called “mindmeister,” which we can share and make a mind map online together.  First we made clusters with each personas, and wrote down what they said about the donor system. Second we collected the common elements of information and asked ourselves “why this happens.” By doing so, we could find out that although there are many fans of this NGO, like those who register on the mailing list, few people donate. Donations were done by very few people like professors and specialists but not by “light fans.” This conclusion united the group because the goal became clear, so in that sense, mind mapping was very effective.

Insight and Approach I found out that mind mapping is a strong tool for gathering, sharing your team’s assumptions and creating a common goal. And is effective before generating ideas about how to solve them. I’d like to use it the  next time between ‘what is ’and ‘what if ’ phase, and also to use different tools when it comes to ‘what if’ phase. In the ‘what if ’phase, after using a mind mapping tool, we moved on to thinking how to improve the PRs. At that time we focused on how to make attractive potential HP and SNS they were using but I regret that we just focused on the media which this NGO already had. I didn't know the design thinking at that time and creative idea generation was lacking. Now after the course, I'd like to focus more on how to be more creative when thinking about the solution, because the hypothesis story was clear after the mind mapping and unless this goal is clear, we could be more creative, for example using “brainstorming''. But overall, taking this course was a very good opportunity for reflecting on my project and my way of  problem-solving thinking, thank you!

