Engagement Canvas
The Engagement Canvas is your project’s strategy on one page. It captures the reasoning behind the engagement — what decision is being made, what influence is honestly on offer, who must be heard, and how you’ll prove input mattered — before any sessions are designed or tasks assigned.
It maps directly to the Decision Foundations and Engagement Design steps of the 10-step engagement sequence.
If you skip this: delivery starts from a method list instead of a strategy. Teams run the sessions they always run, for the audiences easiest to reach, and discover at reporting time that nobody can say what the engagement was for.
Accessing the Canvas
From the project sidebar, go to Planning → Canvas, or follow the primary action on Project Home when it reads Continue canvas.
The header shows the mode chip (Engage mode — see Communications mode below), a progress card tracking sections drafted, and the canvas actions: Draft with EVA, Preview, Export PDF, and Share.
The sections
The canvas is organised into three colour-coded groups. Ten sections show by default; work top to bottom — each group creates the conditions the next one requires.
Strategic Foundation
| # | Section | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Project Context | Mirrors your Project Context surface — the decision, what’s open, what’s fixed. Read-only here; it keeps the canvas anchored to the real decision space. |
| 2 | Level & Promise | What level of influence is being offered, and what is the promise? (IAP2: Inform → Consult → Involve → Collaborate → Empower) |
| 3 | Engagement Objectives | What do we need to learn or test, and how will that input shape the decision? |
Level & Promise is a commitment, not an aspiration. Choose the level your decision space and resources can honestly deliver. A “Consult” delivered well builds more trust than an “Involve” delivered as consultation.
People
| # | Section | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Stakeholders | Who needs to be heard, and whose absence would make this engagement incomplete? |
| 5 | Priority Groups | Which groups require deliberate extra effort to reach, and how will we reach them? |
| 6 | Participant Experience | What quality of participation are we designing for, and how will we make it genuinely accessible? |
The Stakeholders section is a guided workspace of its own: name the groups, assign each a strategic role, flag priority groups, and design around the barriers they face. The groups you map here flow through the entire product — priority-group coverage in the Delivery Plan’s guidance, activity targeting, and the Results coverage view all trace back to this section.
Phases and milestones both live on the canvas. The Timeframe section manages the same phases and milestones the Delivery Plan uses — one shared structure, two doors. Phases named here (or created inline on an activity in Engagement Approach) become real delivery phases: activities sit under them on the Delivery Plan rail, and every task created for those activities — manually or via EVA’s task suggestions — inherits the phase automatically.
Delivery
| # | Section | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | Engagement Approach | What overall approach fits the objective, barriers, level of engagement, and timing? Each activity can be assigned a delivery phase here — pick an existing phase or create a new one inline. |
| 8 | Timeframe | When can public input genuinely influence decisions — and when is it too late? Manages both milestones (the dated decision moments) and delivery phases (the named stages the engagement moves through). |
| 9 | Evidence of Influence | How will we show that community input shaped the decision? |
| 10 | Closing the Loop | How and when will participants hear what happened to their input? |
Closing the Loop is the most consistently skipped commitment in engagement practice. Filling it in at the planning stage — before delivery begins — turns “we should get back to people” into a documented promise with a date. See Close & Learn.
A Supporting context area below the groups lets you add four more optional sections when a project needs them — Why are we engaging?, Constraints & Resources, Key Messages, and Reach & Channels — background that shapes the design without being part of the default one-page story.
Working in a section
Click any section to open its workspace. Each section offers:
- A focused editor for the section content — type directly, or use the section’s EVA actions to draft and refine
- Guidance for what the section needs to cover, with quality checks on the content
- A live canvas preview so you can see the one-page result forming
Content saves automatically.
Drafting with EVA
Per section — every section has inline EVA support that drafts from your Project Context, uploaded materials, and what’s already on the canvas.
Whole canvas — Draft with EVA in the header opens a section picker. Each section shows its state — Already filled, Draft in its section, or Edit directly — and empty sections are pre-selected (use Select All Empty or Select None to adjust). Filled sections stay unchecked unless you opt in to have EVA replace them. Running it produces a connected first draft across the selected sections; a couple of table-backed sections (Stakeholders, Engagement Approach) are drafted only when empty and are otherwise managed directly. It’s a starting point for editing, not an answer: EVA cannot know what is genuinely open to influence in your community or what sensitivities exist. Review every section against reality before sharing.
The stronger your Project Context, the better the draft. A canvas drafted from an empty context is generic by definition.
Communications mode
If the project is classified as a Communications Project (see Project Context), the canvas switches to the Communication Canvas — ten sections built for inform-mode work: Project Context (read-only), Communication Purpose, Audiences, Access, Inclusion & Trust Risks, Message Architecture, Channels, Tactics & Messengers, Communication Timing, Transparency & Response, Issues & Enquiry Handling, and Evidence of Understanding.
The mode chip in the header shows which canvas you’re on. Switching modes follows the project classification — change the classification from the Project Definition card in Project Context, not by working around the canvas.
Why two canvases: asking “who needs to be heard?” on a project where decisions are already made invites a promise you can’t keep. The Communication Canvas asks the honest versions of those questions for inform-mode work.
Sharing and exporting
- Preview shows the formatted one-page canvas — populated sections (including Project Context) are auto-summarised into the one-page view
- Export PDF produces a snapshot to circulate outside CE Canvas
- Share marks the canvas as the agreed planning position for the team
The canvas remains editable in any state — sharing is a signal, not a lock.
Where the canvas flows
The canvas is the strategic source for everything downstream:
- Delivery Plan — turns canvas activities into a phased workplan (“Generate your workplan” on Project Home)
- Engagement Plan — the generated formal document expands the canvas for approval and compliance audiences
- Results — coverage is measured against the stakeholder groups mapped in section 4
- Reporting — outcomes reports trace back to the objectives (3) and the evidence and closing-the-loop commitments (9, 10)
Next steps
- Project Context — strengthen the foundation the canvas draws from
- Delivery Plan — turn the strategy into who does what, when
- Engagement Sequence Overview — the thinking behind the section order