Episode 3 brings us Jennifer Taylor and Sarah Goletz from the Indiana Area Health Education Center (AHEC) to talk about ripple effect mapping (REM). We knew very little about REM, so we sat like schoolchildren at the proverbial feet of Jennifer and Sarah as they patiently walked us through the basics. If you too are unfamiliar with REM, it's a method that combines elements of appreciative inquiry, mind mapping, and participatory evaluation to ascertain how participants and others involved in or affected by a program describe the program's outcomes and impact. It can also be used to identify a program's unintended consequences (both positive and negative) and inform recommendations. This page on the University of Minnesota Extension School's website has some great resources that help explain how it all works. At a high level, it involves gathering 12 to 20 stakeholders in a room, guiding them through a process where they talk in pairs about elements of the program they appreciate or find impactful, and then facilitating a discussion wherein participants share out their ideas while facilitators organize and map these ideas on a large sheet of paper, whiteboard, or projector at the front of the room. The result is a cool map that visually depicts a program's impacts (see example here).

Jennifer and  Sarah stumbled upon REM in their own work at AHEC, and now they not only use REM in their own research, they also happily teach others how to do so. Though COVID has put a temporary damper on some of this work, they were able to host a workshop in Fall 2020 and are happy to serve as evangelists for the method in any way they can. If you have questions, hit them up!