Engagement Playbooks
A playbook is your organisation’s engagement practice, encoded: a workflow template that generates delivery phases, tasks, milestones, and method suggestions appropriate to a project type and template-fit level. Applying one gives a new project a proven operational skeleton in minutes — which your team then makes specific.
If you skip this: every project rebuilds the same scaffolding from scratch, and quality depends on who happens to be running it. Playbooks are how good practice stops being tribal knowledge.
Applying a workflow template
On Project Home, the Workflow template section shows the project’s template state — choose one when starting out, or Review / Change an applied configuration later.
The wizard has two steps:
Step 1 — Configure. Choose the playbook and project type (the project type tunes which methods and timings are suggested), select one or more template-fit levels (at least one is required), and set a consultation start date and duration so tasks can be scheduled. The template-fit level is guidance for which methods and tasks the playbook suggests — the project’s actual IAP2 participation level is set in the Engagement Canvas Level & Promise section, not here.
Step 2 — Review & apply. Review the workflow scaffold before it lands, across two tabs:
- Tasks — every task the playbook proposes, with its timing (offset from your milestones). Recommended tasks are pre-selected; deselect what doesn’t apply.
- Method suggestions — the engagement methods the playbook suggests for this type and level.
Nothing applies until you press Apply scaffold — and nothing it creates is locked. Generated tasks land on Tasks scheduled relative to your milestones; phases appear in the Delivery Plan, and the methods you select are added as Engagement Canvas activities.
Available playbooks
A starter playbook, Engagement Essentials, ships as a general-purpose framework suitable for most community engagement projects. Organisations maintain their own playbooks (project types, methods, task templates) in Organisation Settings → Playbook.
Custom playbooks — sector-specific workflows, compliance frameworks, or your organisation’s signature methodology can be encoded as custom playbooks. Contact CE Canvas to discuss.
After applying
- Tasks are scheduled relative to your milestones — set milestones first (Delivery Plan → Manage phases & milestones) and the whole schedule lands correctly; move a milestone later and relative tasks move with it
- Review the generated set within the first week: delete what doesn’t apply, add what’s missing, assign owners
- Re-open the wizard from Review on Project Home to check or change the configuration
Next steps
- Delivery Plan — where the generated structure lives
- Tasks — triage and assign the generated tasks
- Project Team Members — add the people the work belongs to