“Infinitely more important than sharing one’s material wealth is sharing the wealth of ourselves – our time and energy, our passion and commitment, and, above all, our love.”

- William E. Simon, former Secretary of Treasury, businessman & philanthropist

What’s the best way to share your maps, or as you read above, the wealth of ourselves, with others?

The process of creating your maps with Mindjet can be a liberating and ecstatic experience.

Your maps reflect your individual and team vision, thoughts, ideas, plans, dreams, etc…

Everyone who participated in the map’s creation is ready to take the journey from inspiration to realization.

With Mindjet Catalyst and the new release of MindManager 8 for Windows, it’s now easier than ever before to share your genius and passion with other stakeholders via email or over 150 social networks.

You click ’share’ and send the map off into the ether…only to find that you’ve now hit a brick wall!

Your stakeholders contact you confused and overwhelmed!

What went wrong?

When sharing with others, consider the following factors to make your maps more approachable and understood by the people who did not participate in their creation.

Make Your Maps Approachable

1. Set the Context: Prepare your audience by setting up the proper context before they open your map. Why are you sending it? Are there any expected actions? Is this their first time seeing a map? If so, give them the basics of how to navigate within the map.
2. Understand Your Audience: Achieving the proper balance to communicate effectively is an art. Consider your audience, your goals, what they know, their motivations, their goals, etc…
3. Prepare a Map Legend: If you’ve used icons, images, colors or other elements to represent ideas, concepts or status, prepare a map legend that gives your reader something to review to learn exactly what each element represents.
4. Use the Most Appropriate Layout: Generally speaking, a right-facing map is one of the most approachable formats. You can still take advantage of presenting your content both visually and linearly. Org charts are also a familiar and easily understood format.  Radial maps tend to be the least approachable for people who are less familiar with the concept of mapping.
5. Guide Your Readers: Adding numbers, roman numerals, or other elements to illustrate where to start, what order to proceed in, and where to finish reviewing the map. Prevent map shock and avoid overwhelm with this technique! You’ll find that this is most relevant when you use a radial layout.
6. Don’t Dump, Chunk: Don’t overwhelm readers with too many topics in a branch. Keep it to no more than 5-8 topics per level. Break longer lists into categorized chunks and let your readers navigate to the categories as needed.
7. Don’t Verbalize, Visualize: Add images and info-graphic to replace long textual topics. When you are writing, use clear, concise language. The emphasis should be on clear communication, not grammar. Mapping analyst & blogger Chuck Frey stated eloquently, use ‘high impact words’.
8. Filter Extraneous Information: I typically create ‘master maps’ that literally contain hundreds if not thousands of topics. Will I share that with others? No. I filter the map and share a relevant, customized subset of my mega-map.
9. Review before Sending: Take a walk in the shoes of your reader. If you were your audience and received this map via email, could you open it up and understand it without having to pick up the phone and call for help?

Special thanks to Adam Siemiginowski who inspired and contributed to today’s post!

What are your tips and secrets for sharing maps with others?