Capture whole Engagement Campaign design details quickly and effectively for discussion and guidance

About the canvas

The Stakeholder Engagement Campaign Canvas is a tool to use in organisational change management. It can be populated by experienced and novice change practitioners. It is designed to be read (or consumed) by those with responsibility for designing campaigns of engagement activity for one or more groups.

The canvas is a way to present visually on a single page, a coherent concept of multiple inter-related parts – in this case the design of a single engagement activity or event.

Questo has created templates of the Engagement Campaign Canvas: for printing (PDF) and digital-fillable (PDF). They are available for use under a Creative Commons licence with stated conditions. Sections of the canvas can also be simply redrawn on a whiteboard or large sheets of paper, for population by a group in an co-design session.

The Canvas performs a number of functions:

• Simple yet coherent documentation of a campaign concept design
• Prototyping or hypothesising quickly about potential campaigns; there may be more than one concept that is valid to consider
• Tool for conversation and exploration with sponsors and collaborators about proposed campaign concepts
• Tool for guiding more detailed planning of the campaign concept (providing mobility and immutability of knowledge for collaborators to draw upon a common understanding)

The Engagement Campaign Canvas has 13 dimensions that are explained below.

As a supplement, the activities listed in the Campaign could entries in a spreadsheet for recording in a central single schedule of all stakeholder engagement activities, and the additional meta-data of Campaign Name (or short reference number).

A mix of canvases

Questo has developed two other canvases which can have a strong relationship to the Engagement Campaign canvas:

• Engagement Activity Canvas which is use for specific activity-events that may be part of a Campaign.
• Stakeholder Group Profile Canvas which is used for stakeholder groups that may be the target audience for whom Campaign is designed and run.

About a campaign approach for engagement

Rather than attempting to define a whole end-to-end communications plan for a project of change, an agile effective strategy can be to take a multi-campaign approach. A campaign is a time-boxed purpose-driven approach to engaging a group of people.

A change project could have one major campaign running across the life of the project, plus additional shorter campaigns for different people and different purposes running simulatenously or in sequence.

Campaigns don’t have to be designed and run centrally. With an understanding about the concept and how to use, any change agent could propose a campaign that can be considered and run in the context of other parallel or adjacent campaigns. Documenting the campaigns with this canvas is one way to get the knowledge immutable and mobile and empower others to participate in the changing process.

Engagement Campaign Key Dimensions

Note: The Canvas is not meant to capture every detail about your Engagement Campaign. Aim for a macro view of essential details that guide more detailed planning and delivery.

NAME: A unique name to identify this Campaign.

DESCRIPTION: A description of the broad nature and scope of the Campaign.

AUDIENCE:  The groups of people whom you are engaging as the target of this Campaign.

START DATE: The opening date of the Campaign.

END DATE: The close date of the Campaign.

PROJECT: The name of the project for which the Campaign is run.

PURPOSE: What the organisation seeks from the Engagment AND what the participant might reasonably seek from the Engagement.

KEY FACTORS: Using the Hope-Trust-Compassion-Stability factors, to indicate where the Audience is at Now, and where the Campaign seeks to move the Audience to.

ABO FOCUS: Drawing on the ABO model (PDF), the target level of engagement sought for this audience by this Campaign. (i.e. Awareness, Buy-In, Ownership).

SPONSOR: The Sponsor who approves and will likely be a key spokesperson in running the Campaign.

LEAD: The Change Management practitioner who will provide expertise in leading the development and running of the Campaign.

CO-ORDINATOR: The person behind the scences who will coordinate the details for running this Campaign.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES: The principles influencing the design and delivery of this Campaign.

ACTIVITIES: A list of the engagement activities, loosely in sequence that make up this Campaign.

An example

Here’s an example of a populated canvas from a real situation.

Populating the Canvas (aka designing your campaign)

We encourage co-design activity with audience representatives when designing a campaign of Engagement Activity. The canvas can help a group co-design with a focus on the relevant design decisions to explore and make.

One input to designing a campaign can be a set of change design principles. Your Engagement Campaign can be creatively constrained to address 4-6 design principles that guide design decisions about what activities are the ‘right’ fit for the particular purpose of a campaign. [For advice on how to acquire a set of relevant principles, see Potential approaches in using our Change Design Principles Cards.]

If you have eager change agents, who are willing to propose an whole Engagement Campaign – encourage them to use the template to capture their idea and submit it for consideration.

There is no fixed process about how to populate the canvas. Start anywhere that makes sense to you or your collaborators, and collate your thoughts about the (proposed) design.

As you populate the various sections, you can cross-check that what you are designing is logical, and flows in connection with others sections.

One way to ‘read’ the canvas to check for coherency, is a narrative like this:

We will engage this AUDIENCE with these ACTIVITIES lead by this SPONSOR to serve this PURPOSE and have a desired impact on these KEY FACTORS and ABO-FOCUS by this END DATE.

Using the Canvas

With an agreed concept design, as defined and understood in a completed and approved canvas, the work to deliver the Campaign can be better scoped and delegated.

But wait there’s more

There are many things on the Questo website that can be helpful to Change Management practitioners. Check out Resources and Articles.

Intentional Acts of Appreciation

If you have got value from this free-yet-priceless resource, your appreciation is very welcome. Tell us about how it went when you used it, and subsidise Helen’s coffee pleasure to help fuel her creation process.

This work by Questo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.