📚 Are Causal Map and causal mapping for you?

So, you’re getting excited about creating maps – but is your project right for it?

✅ Use Causal Map if you:

• have a relatively large amount of narrative data (enough to provide at least 20-30 causal links)
• need help to organise a large number of links and summarise them into an overview or synthesis
• have information from more than one source (for example different respondents, different documents, or different places in one document) and the information about the source is important to you: they aren’t all interchangeable
• are interested in possible differences between the sources and groups of sources – and/or you don’t necessarily have a preconceived idea of the contents or boundaries of the map
• want to capture what your sources actually say, systematically and transparently

❌ Causal Map map is not suitable if you:

• only have a relatively small map which you can manage with traditional tools for drawing network diagrams (e.g. PowerPoint, kumu.io etc.)
• need to analyse quantitative data and/or need to do precise mathematical modelling, e.g. of future states of a system under certain conditions
• would like to sketch out a plan (e.g. Theory of Change or similar) without much reference to the different sources underpinning each link