Engagement Canvas
The Engagement Canvas is your project’s strategic planning surface. It captures the reasoning behind your engagement — what decisions are being made, who needs to be heard, what constraints apply, and how you’ll close the loop — before any sessions are designed or tasks assigned.
This maps directly to the Decision Foundations and Engagement Design phases of the 10-step engagement sequence.
Accessing the Canvas
From your project sidebar, navigate to Planning → Engagement Canvas, or click the Engagement Canvas card on the Project Home.
The canvas is a 4-row grid of 12 sections. The canvas header includes actions to Apply Playbook, Draft Canvas (EVA drafts all sections at once), Export PDF, and toggle the canvas status between Ready to Share and Mark as Draft.
Canvas sections
Row 1 — Purpose
These sections establish why the engagement is happening and what it needs to achieve. Complete these before anything else.
| Section | What to capture |
|---|---|
| Why We’re Engaging | The problem, decision, or opportunity driving the engagement |
| Decision Context | What decisions are fixed vs. genuinely open to community influence |
| What Success Looks Like | Desired outcomes and how you’ll know the engagement worked |
The Decision Context section directly corresponds to Steps 1–2 of the engagement sequence — mapping the decision space and establishing scope and constraints honestly. If this is vague, your engagement has no anchor.
Row 2 — Constraints
These sections surface the realities that shape what is possible. They should be completed before designing stakeholder engagement.
| Section | What to capture |
|---|---|
| Timeframe | Fixed dates, statutory periods, key milestones — structured milestone entries |
| Resources & Budget | Available staff, budget, in-kind support |
| Constraints | Legal, political, safety, scope, or prior commitment limits |
Row 3 — People
These sections drive stakeholder and inclusion planning. They feed directly into method selection (Step 7).
| Section | What to capture |
|---|---|
| Who Needs to Be Heard | Stakeholder groups — added as named segments with descriptions |
| Inclusion & Access | Participation barriers for each group and how you’ll address them |
| Known Sensitivities | Historical context, community tensions, or trust issues that affect design |
Who Needs to Be Heard links to your stakeholder segments. Each segment you add here becomes available for assignment when configuring engagement methods and activities.
Row 4 — Delivery
These sections translate the planning above into delivery commitments.
| Section | What to capture |
|---|---|
| How We’ll Engage | The engagement activities and methods you’ll run |
| Key Messages | Core messages every channel and team member should carry |
| Closing the Loop | How and when participants will hear what happened to their input |
Closing the Loop is the most consistently skipped section in engagement practice. Filling it in at the planning stage — before delivery begins — creates an explicit commitment. See the Engagement Sequence Overview for why this matters.
Editing a section
Click any section on the canvas to open the editing drawer at the bottom of the screen.
The drawer contains:
- A rich text editor for the section content
- A Regenerate button — EVA will generate or regenerate a draft for the section based on your uploaded resources and other completed sections
- A Show guide toggle — opens guidance notes for that section
- A Done button to close the drawer; content is saved automatically
Using EVA to draft canvas content
EVA can generate content for any section in two ways:
Per section: Click Regenerate in the section drawer. EVA checks your uploaded Resources & Context and the content already in other sections, then generates a draft you can edit or discard.
All sections at once: Click Draft Canvas in the canvas header. EVA works through all 12 sections and produces a full first draft based on your project resources.
EVA’s output is a starting point, not a final answer. Review every draft against your actual project context — EVA cannot know what is genuinely open to community influence or what sensitivities exist in your community.
You can also use EVA Chat (Ask EVA in the top nav) to work through specific sections conversationally — asking EVA to refine a draft, suggest stakeholder groups, or help frame the decision context.
Canvas status
The canvas header includes two status actions:
- Ready to Share — marks the canvas as reflecting the current agreed planning position, visible to the project team
- Mark as Draft — returns the canvas to draft status while you continue refining
This is a signalling tool for the project team, not an access control. Either status allows editing. Use Export PDF to share a snapshot of the canvas outside CE Canvas.
Relationship to the rest of the project
The canvas is the strategic foundation for everything that follows in the project workflow:
- Apply Playbook uses the canvas’s project type and engagement context to suggest appropriate tasks and methods
- Planning phase tasks are informed by the constraints and stakeholder context in the canvas
- Results and Reporting should trace back to the objectives set in What Success Looks Like and the commitments made in Closing the Loop
A well-completed canvas makes every downstream step more purposeful and auditable.
Next steps
- Resources and Context — upload project documents before drafting the canvas for better EVA suggestions
- Apply a Playbook — once the canvas is drafted, use it to generate structured tasks and methods
- Engagement Sequence Overview — understand how the canvas fits into the full 10-step sequence