Define your problem and structure your project

It is crucial to define your goals and approach clearly. This gives focus to your work - but it's not set in stone: keep revisiting it as the project progresses.

> Stop! This toolbox defines influence mapping projects broadly and some of its lessons should be applicable to a range of situations, but nonetheless check if you're in the right place.

Why and What? Vision and Goals

It's important to express what your current goals are for the project. This might change over the course of the project, and might evolve from being very ambitiously framed ("save the world") to much more tightly defined. Here are a few more examples of well defined project aims:

• OpenCorporates exists to make information about companies and the corporate world more accessible, more discoverable, and more usable, and thus give citizens, community groups, journalists, other companies, and society as a whole the ability to understand, monitor and regulate them.
• Lobbyradar uncovers the lobbying groups and private interests in German politics.
• Cargografias fosters transparency in Argentinian politics, helps citizens to get a full picture of the political history of the presidential candidates and members of the government in Argentina, and thus make decisions based on these facts.

Formulating your goals and vision helps you communicate your project to others, helps you develop links across communities and also helps you and your team keep your focus. This content can also be useful for fundraising, partnership building, communication on your website or social media as well as recruitment. It's particularly important to be clear on your aims versus how you want to achieve them if you are applying for funding for your project or writing a business plan. The next section explore how you might go about achieving your aims.

> Stop! If you haven't written down what you're trying to achieve with your project, it's time to take the time to formulate your aims and "put them on paper".

How? Approach and Methodology

Now that you have clearly expressed your goal, you also need to express how you're going to get there. Different sectors will call this differently, for instance theory of change, approach, methodology or business plan.

It's useful to first formulate a top level description of how you will achieve your project's aims. Try to keep it to one sentence:

• OpenCorporates aims to do a straightforward (though big) thing: have a URL for every company in the world.
• Lobbyradar enables users to explore network visualisations that show links between institutions and people of influence within the german political sphere.
• Cargografias allows you to explore the timelines of the electoral mandates of the Argentinian representatives.

Bear in mind that this probably will change over time. While you explore a particular approach, you might discover or stumble upon another more impactful or more achievable way to attain your goals.

Have you applied or developed a practice that you would like to share with the influence mapping community? Edit this post on Github!