Graphic or Visual Facilitation

Children's meeting
Who is it for?
Researchers, participants and the research audience

Overview:

Graphic facilitation is a technique to visualise research findings and capture live discussions in a visual format with support of a specialist facilitator. We used this technique in CAFADA in order to ‘sense check’ some of our project findings with children (and also women) who had taken part in the research. A professional graphic facilitator worked with a researcher to summarise early findings from interviews in an accessible and visual form. This supported us to feedback our initial analysis of findings with women and children who had taken part in interviews, and to work with them to check and refine them. This also became the basis for a subsequent piece of influencing work where children and women were supported to present the findings to policy makers, alongside their personal reflections.

 

Key strengths: 

Large poster style, visual summaries of findings from research with women and children provided a helpful focus for discussion and ‘sense-checking’ the findings. Seeing the findings presented this way was both powerful and accessible. Being able to annotate the physical posters with post-it notes and stickers helped us all to interact with the findings and review, amend and nuance them. 

Key challenges:

It can be hard to distil lengthy findings into much shorter and accessible summaries. Lots of decision making about what is important and how to group or theme the findings often necessarily takes place before children and women get involved and can thus limit their influence.

 

“I can remember leaving those workshops thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this [graphic facilitation] … I’m going to do this, again’, in terms of sharing the findings and getting a visual, a big visual representation, because it felt really useful, like people could literally get up out of their seat, stand and look and talk.” (Researcher)