What is Event Design Canvas?
Written by Katie K. Riggs
Event Design Canvas, or ECD, is a certification program that is globally recognized as one of the most strategic ways to reinvent or plan a new meeting from scratch. It was developed by a small team in the United Kingdom, and the purpose of it is to allow meeting owners the opportunity to go back to square one with their meetings. Most people tend to plan logistics first when planning a meeting. What are the dates of the event? How many days is it going to be? Should we go to Scottsdale or Minneapolis?
However, when you start with logistics as a first approach, we often find out that it is hard to meet the needs of your attendees even though that is the way about 95 percent of meetings, events, and conferences are planned. With EDC, we go back to the beginning and start with the stakeholders for your meeting. In this case, it’s the “who” opposed to the “what.”
When you get into the EDC process with a certified EDC facilitator, the first steps of planning have nothing to do with meeting design at all. The facilitator, or myself, would take the group through the process starting with stakeholders first. We would create a stakeholder long list, and in that list we’re going to identify a shorter list of about two to three people who have a vested interest in this event or organization. We figure out who has the highest interest and power in this event and end up planning for those individuals.
I worked with a group where we took our internal three day leadership training through this process. This particular company was extremely busy with around 400 meetings a year that were full of big teams. The managers that were coming to this meeting just really didn't have the time to invest in themselves or come to a two or three day event. When we did this process and we really planned for them, they were able to see that their time was well spent. And in turn there wasn't grunting and moaning about being at the event we executed, which resulted in higher morale and commitment to the company.
Your meeting, event, or conference cannot be all things to all people or all of your audience demographic. If you were coming at it with that approach, things would end up feeling disjointed and chaotic. You’d almost be planning multiple events.
After we’ve established that, we deep dive into a process of figuring out what our short list of stakeholders are thinking, feeling, what they’re seeing, their frustrations, their stressors, and also their goals and what they hope to get out of the meeting or the event. We map all of that out into three different canvases. We then come down to the end of those three canvases, and we end up with what we call a profile or a one pager on each stakeholder. This is really just a description of exactly who this person is as they engage with your meeting. They’re going to have different facets as they engage in their church, volunteer, or family lives, but we want to know who they are when it comes to your association, corporation, or meeting. Once we do that for two or three stakeholders, that is the base for us to design your actual event.
It’s important that we realize we are often trying to plan our meetings for too many audience segments. That is when a professional needs to step in and help rework the event to cater to a small group instead of starting with logistics.
If your corporation’s event is designed to make a profit, the only way to ensure that a profit is made year after year is to serve that audience or those few key audience segments that are imperative to the meeting or event success in a way that they feel like they cannot miss the event the next year. It needs to feel like a “must attend.”
When this happens, the event starts to get word of mouth traffic. People are posting on social media. People are telling their colleagues. The real ROI is having a meeting where people walk away and don’t feel like it was a giant waste of their time, and if they had to travel all the way to a small town in Montana on Christmas day next year to go to this meeting, they would do it because it was so good that they don’t care what hoops they would have to jump through to get there to attend. At the end of the day, that’s the kind of hook you want into your audience segments.
When you do an outside association meeting or a retreat, like a women's retreat, you market it, and there are either people who just enjoy going to that kind of thing or they want to come just to see their colleagues. However, when you're talking about an internal event, like a lot of corporations have, whether it’s a sales meeting, training, or staff retreats, you're likely pulling teeth to get people to want to come to that event. Even though those are not money-making events, people are sometimes still dreading coming to your internal corporate event. And then you spend a ton of money on it. I don't know if there's a bigger slap in the face.
People usually think of strategic processes taking a long time, especially in the association or nonprofit worlds. However, the process of EDC can be done in a weekend. All we need to make it a success is time, space, a small investment in order to bring a group of six to 10 people together in a space to get the work done. You can head out to the retreat on Friday afternoon and have a full event designed on Monday morning with a schedule on your website and all. Then, you start the logistical planning.
A lot of organizations are scrambling right now because of what's been going on in the last couple of years—especially those that rely on trade shows, annual conferences, seminars, meetings, or retreats to make money for their organizations. They're having to cut a lot of their previous events or take them virtual and lose the in-person component. Because of this, there’s a lot of competition. Organizations need to move forward strategically or they are not going to be successful in these meetings and events. People are going to expect more and they’re going to expect better.
The number one win is that normally when meetings and events are being planned, there's a very small team of people planning those meetings and events. When this is happening, the teams planning this event aren’t usually inviting a lot of collaborators into the process. As human beings, we love things that we feel we put our stamp of approval on or that we got a say in how things were set up. The process of EDC allows for that.
When you use Event Design Canvas, you gain a small group of champions for your event or meeting, which is the best marketing you can have. They're going to tell everybody about it, and you have vested interests right off the bat. You also have a more strategically aligned event at the end of the day. You know that moving forward, when the marketing team has to go out and sell this event, or the leadership team has to let people know about this, they have something with good bones to share, and it should essentially sell itself.
The EDC process yields events or meetings that sell themselves and provide high ROI for both the participants and the host organizations. If these results are what you are looking for then completing the EDC process for your future event or conference is a must.
Looking for an EDC facilitator? Contact Riggs & Co to set up a free exploration call!