Event design: using the Event Canvas Model, you design events that change behavior

Het Event Canvas Model is derived from the well-known Business Model Canvas (BMC). This is a strategic business document developed in 2010 by Alex Osterwalder to map out your entire organization on a single page. With the BMC, you summarize your stakeholders, your activities, your costs, and six other elements of your business on one page. This gives entrepreneurs an overview and makes it clear what their business needs to focus on. The Event Canvas Model aims to do the same: it shows at a glance what your event's goal is and how to get there. However, while the BMC aims to map out an organization's business model, the Event Canvas Model focuses on the behavioral change of your attendees.

What is the Event Canvas Model?

The Event Canvas Model is a strategic event design model used to organize events that change the behavior of your stakeholders/attendees. Ruud Janssen and Roel Frissen (Event Design Collective) described this in the Event Design Handbook, which they published in 2016.

The Event Canvas consists of fourteen building blocks. A large portion of these building blocks (twelve, to be exact) should be viewed as the conditions for your event. Ruud Janssen calls these design constraints. By this, he means the preconditions that define what your design can and cannot be before you start designing. It is only with the remaining two building blocks that you actually begin designing.

All fourteen of these building blocks are divided into three phases: Change, Frame, and Design. Let’s go through those phases one by one. But before we dive in deep, it’s helpful to watch this short video first.

Event design phase 1: Change

In this first phase of the event design process, you map out the desired change using the Event Canvas Model. Who are your attendees, and with what mindset should they leave your event? These are the left and right pillars on the canvas. Here you will find the following building blocks:

• Entering behavior (entry behavior): What do your stakeholders say and do prior to your event regarding the themes and topics that will be highlighted during the event?

• Exiting behavior (exit behavior): What do your stakeholders say and do after your event about the themes and topics you addressed during your event? The authors call the before-and-after difference in perception the Event Delta. This is the ultimate goal of your event.

• Pains: Map out the barriers, fears, and frustrations related to the event's theme that attendees bring with them when coming to your event.

• Gains: What are the wants and needs of your attendees? And what does success look like when the aforementioned pains are overcome?

Event design phase 2: Frame

"Without a frame, design is called art." With this quote, Ruud Janssen wants to make it clear that if you don't set clear boundaries, designing is mostly art. Not design. According to him, it is therefore important to first clearly establish the conditions for your event. Consequently, no fewer than eight of the fourteen building blocks are included in the Frame phase.

• Expectations: Map out what the attendee expects from your event. Has your attendee attended a previous event of yours? Were there reviews about it? Did colleagues attend that event? Additionally, the campaigns you organize around your event also influence your attendees' expectations about your event.

• Satisfaction: To what extent was the event able to live up to the expectations above? Did the attendees get what they came for?

• Commitment: What must an attendee be willing to invest to come to your event? Think of time, availability, costs, etc.

• Return: Your attendee comes to your event and has made the above commitments to do so. What do they get in return? What do they walk away with afterward?

• Cost and Revenue: These two building blocks form the financial framework of your event. In other words: what does it yield for you financially as the event organizer? Want to know more about ticket prices? Read our tips on determining your ticket prices.

• Jobs to be done: What tasks must the event have fulfilled for your attendee afterward? On a functional, social, and emotional level?

• Promise: What do you promise your attendees? Keep this promise short but powerful.

Event design phase 3: Design

In this phase (and with the final two building blocks), you actually start designing your event. After using all the previous building blocks to set up the conditions (read: the Frame), you can finally get to work on the heart of the canvas. You do this using the experience journey and instructional design.

• Instructional design (learning design): Everything you want to pass on to your attendees in terms of knowledge. Think of skills, knowledge, attitude, and behavior that should result from your programming and the networking moments during the event.

• Experience journey (experience): Or, in other words, "event planning." This includes all the chronological touchpoints your attendees go through during the event that should ensure the intended behavioral changes are realized. You document this in the run-of-show. But don't forget that touchpoints both before and after your event also influence this. This makes the registration process super important, too.

Download the Event Canvas template

Now that we’ve gone through all the steps, it’s time to map your own event onto the canvas. A template of the Event Design Collective can be downloaded for free on the Event Design Collective website. Download the template, print it out, and sit down with your colleagues to really dig into it. It is truly worth thoroughly examining your next event by going through all the steps of the canvas with an open mind. Do I really know what my attendees are struggling with? Am I truly offering them the right experience to achieve their goals? When you carefully fill out all the building blocks during the event design process, you’ll naturally find out. And as a result, you’ll be able to produce an even better event.

From Event Canvas to event strategy

Once you’ve gone through the phases of the Event Canvas Model and the corresponding building blocks are down on paper, your canvas is complete. But now what? How do you ensure that what’s currently on paper actually gets executed? And most importantly: how do you know whether your event achieves the desired behavior in your attendees? How do you measure something like that?

At first glance, these seem like complex questions to answer. But fortunately, the solution is simpler than you think. Because the baseline measurement you need in Phase 1 (Change) and Phase 2 (Frame) starts right at event registration. Your registration data tells you which attendees are coming to your event, what job titles they hold, and which organizations they work for. If you add the question "What should this event deliver for you?", you also map out your attendees' expectations. Perfect for measuring the "Expectations" building block. And afterward, as part of the "Satisfaction" building block, you can record the attendance and evaluation data on the other side of the Event Canvas.

If you use smart registration software for your event, you'll have a solid research tool for your Event Canvas in hand. Especially if you organize a multi-year event. This year's analysis then becomes the starting point for next year's event. You then revalidate with real data instead of assumptions. You design, measure, refine, and design something better. Event strategy in full effect.

Event Canvas example: Wikimania, a Wikipedia event

Wikimania is Wikipedia's annual community event. To help set up the 15th edition of this event—an anniversary year for Wikipedia—Ruud Janssen's team was asked to assist with its organization. Their first step? Thoroughly studying all previous editions. Photos, videos, statistics, and reports were placed on a timeline to map out how the event had evolved over the years.

Next, an international team worked in short, ninety-minute design sprints to develop a canvas for each stakeholder, summarized each analysis into a one-to-two-minute video story, and submitted it to the stakeholders themselves for validation. The difference between entry and exit behavior (the Event Delta) yielded twelve concrete design goals, which were converted into twelve prototypes.

Curious how the team tackled this? Watch this video.

Getting started with your next Event Canvas

You now know what the Event Canvas is, how it works, and what you can get out of it. You also know that an event only creates value if it can change your attendees' behavior. And that you can design that behavioral difference using the Event Canvas. What's important here is that you measure what you do. That you know the results of the "Satisfaction" building block end up higher than the expectations the attendees filled out at the start under the "Expectations" building block.

Useful tools

To help you with this, you can try out aanmelder.nl for 30 days with a trial. With aanmelder.nl, you can measure your "Expectations" and "Satisfaction" in a very simple yet accurate way. In no time, you can create a registration form with the right fields. Setting up an evaluation form is just as lightning-fast. Hosting attendees of multiple nationalities at your event? No problem: with aanmelder.nl, you can effortlessly manage multilingual registration forms, websites, and emails to attendees—all from one central dashboard. You can even segment your attendees based on specific "Expectations" and send them different emails than people with different expectations.

Get the most out of your trial period

With your free account, you can of course also try out all the other features of aanmelder.nl, such as ticketing & invoicing, the event website builder, and statistics & reporting. This way, you can see exactly if this fits your workflow and whether you want to use it again for future events. Put it to good use!