Date: Wednesday, October 7, 2026
Hi – we are Olivia Jones and Sally Honeycutt, Senior Lead and Senior Director on the Evaluation Team at the American Heart Association. We’re excited to share a helpful resource we’ve used to support our team culture and growth.
About five years ago, our team went through a major organizational shift. We moved under new leadership, navigated significant staff transitions, and welcomed many new colleagues—an experience that ultimately helped us grow, adapt, and strengthen how we operate.
During this transition, we looked for tools to help build a strong team culture, and our organization’s learning and development trainer introduced us to Culture Canvas. The Culture Canvas is a mapping tool to help organizations build a blueprint for their workplace culture. It provides a structured template for teams to state their values and purpose and then identify how those values and purpose are reflected in our everyday work—things like decision-making, meetings, and feedback.
Since our team operates virtually, we capitalized on an in-person retreat and held a session to start brainstorming. With an oversized printout of the Culture Canvas and many different colored sticky notes, we got to work. The process itself was intuitive since the Culture Canvas website provides clear instructions, including the order in which to approach the 10 different topics. Each person on our team added their anonymous sticky notes to a section, and we facilitated a discussion to align on what we wanted to keep. The discussion was lively and wide ranging, going from deep topics like why we evaluate to practical questions of meeting frequency.
Like a good logic model, developing our team’s Culture Canvas was a collaborative activity that supported shared understanding and helped us make unstated assumptions explicit. Also like a logic model, it’s most valuable as a living document that guides our practice. After the retreat, we created a digital version for final review in our team’s key documents. When new staff join our team, reviewing the Culture Canvas with a senior team member is a part of their onboarding process. Team members have provided feedback that the best reinforcement of our Culture Canvas is how everyone models it in our regular practice.
Finally, every couple of years at an in-person team retreat we re-visit our Culture Canvas and ask ourselves 3 key questions:
We could point to outcomes that our team’s culture supports: a high retention rate, productivity, growth, and increased demand for our services. But the biggest benefit for us personally is how much we enjoy working with our team! As evaluation managers and supervisors, our team’s strong, shared culture helps us manage our work and support the people doing the work.
Culture Design Canvas©
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Evaluation Managers and Supervisors (EMS) TIG Week with our colleagues in the Evaluation Managers and Supervisors Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Gov’t Eval TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please do so using the form on our website. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.