Understanding Templates and Events

The Core Paradigm

Horizon Engage works differently from general-purpose collaboration boards like Miro or Mural. The platform is designed for two primary use cases:

1. Education and training
2. Market research

In both cases, facilitators need a controlled, predictable starting condition for their workshops, classes, or research events. This is the key concept behind how Engage works.

Templates: Your Starting Conditions

A template defines the starting condition for a collaborative experience. Templates include:

• A canvas layout and background
• Pre-configured item types (e.g., parking lot items, positives/negatives)
• Structure for how participants will interact

When you browse templates in the system, you'll see templates for SAFe courses, retrospectives, and other facilitation formats. Templates are read-only — you can view them, but you can't add items or collaborate directly within a template.

Customizing Templates

If a template doesn't quite fit your needs, you can clone it. Cloning creates your own copy that you can modify:

• Change the background
• Add or remove item types
• Pre-populate items
• Adjust the layout

What you're doing when you customize a template is building a framework for divergent and convergent thinking — setting up the structure your participants will use to think together.

Events: Where Collaboration Happens

To start collaborating, you take a template and create an event. An event is a live, collaborative instance of a template where participants can:

• Add items to the canvas
• Move items around the board
• See each other's contributions in real time

Inviting Participants

Each event has a unique Join ID and URL. To invite participants, share the event URL — anyone with the link can join and collaborate in that specific session.

Reusability

When you need to run the same activity again — another class, another retrospective, another research session — you go back to the template and create a new event. Each event is its own independent collaborative session with its own participants and content.

Summary

Once you internalize this paradigm — templates for setup, events for collaboration — everything in Engage flows naturally.