An Update on Canva’s Product Diversity Initiatives
By Cameron Adams, Chief Product Officer
As a service used by millions of people around the world, we strongly believe in the huge responsibility we have to champion diversity, inclusion and representation across every aspect of our work. Every day, people from all over the world come to Canva to bring their creative vision to life, and as our platform continues to grow, so too does our responsibility to create and champion a safe and diverse library of content.
A few weeks ago, we shared an initial announcement detailing the important work we’ve undertaken across a host of initiatives to ensure we’re building a truly diverse and inclusive service for millions of people around the world. We’ve kicked off a number of projects in this space, from improving our search experience to launching Canva’s Diverse Creator Fund with the mission of amplifying creators and championing diversity in every corner of the globe.
Update on Key Projects
Today, I wanted to take the opportunity to provide an update on the work that we’ve been doing over the last few weeks, including changes we’ve launched in the product and the progress we’re making in several other areas.
Introducing Canva’s Diverse Creator Fund
We’re on a mission to build the most diverse library of content on the planet, and to do this, we’re looking to partner with creatives from every corner of the globe as we continue to scale our content production programs. With a global community spanning more than 190 different countries, ensuring that our content library has everything you need while being authentically representative of the world around us is a critical focus area as we continue to expand the content available in Canva.
Canva’s newly launched Diverse Creator Fund will provide an initial $1 million in funding to seek out and directly support a global network of creatives and content creators to capture and produce authentic content, representative of the unique cultures and experiences in every corner of the globe.
We’re already working with a number of content providers through this fund and are actively looking to work with more creatives from all over the world to scale Canva’s content library. If you have suggestions for creators who we should be talking to we would love to hear from you via this form.
Diversity and Ethnicity Boosting in Search
Creating and scaling content is only the first half of the equation — the second is ensuring it can be found without complicated search terms or scrolling through hundreds of results.
We’re continuing to invest in bolstering our search experience and ranking capabilities to ensure that it’s easy to find relevant and representative content. No matter what you’re searching for, our goal is to readily surface a variety of diverse results at the very top of the page.
We’ve already started rolling out these improvements to deliver improved results for popular terms like “dad” and “model.” As our content library continues to grow and evolve, so too will our ability to continue improving Canva’s search functionality, surfacing the perfect variety of content with just a few clicks.
In-Product Feedback on Search Results
Understanding where we can do better and identifying gaps plays an important part in improving Canva’s content library. It’s important that our community is able to provide this feedback and suggestions when they need it most, which is why we’re introducing a few new ways for you to let us know about content you’d like to use while designing.
We’ll use this feedback to commission new content to close gaps in our library while improving our search ranking to surface our existing content based on search terms and content you use regularly. This feature is currently available to 10% of Canva users as we test and scale our feedback collection process before soon rolling this out to our whole community.
Image and Content Reporting
We’re also rolling out new reporting options within the product to ensure that every piece of content on Canva is both safe and appropriate. If you notice an image or illustration that has been incorrectly tagged or doesn’t match what you’re searching for, you’ll be able to report this from within the editor for human review.
This feedback will be used to filter our content library and improve how we label our content as we scale our community contributor programs.
Standardized payment for content creation
We’re committed to fairly paying the creators that we commission to produce new content, and have rolled out a new standardized payment system to ensure consistency for the creators who produce our in-house content.
This new system ensures a more streamlined approach to the way we work with creators around the world, and factors in additional costs required to produce the content, such as talent, time, location, equipment and studio environment.
Regularly spotlighting new and emerging creators
We’re continuing to increase our focus on showcasing emerging creators from a wide variety of backgrounds. We’ve been ramping this up over the last few months and are exploring new ways we can continue to highlight photographers from all over the world. Here’s a look at a few of our recently featured creators:
What’s Next?
We are fully committed to building the most diverse content library on the planet and know there’s much more to continue doing in this space.
Through the key projects happening right now, the work we’re doing today will shape the way we work in the future. More broadly, we’re continuing to work through a company-wide strategy that puts diversity at the centre of every decision we make, ensuring that both diversity and representation are at the forefront of both new and existing product features.
We’re nothing without the perspectives of our diverse community, which is why community feedback has always been our most powerful learning tool. We strongly believe in the important role we have to tailor our platform for our community; it should never be the other way around. Thank you for your continued feedback as we scale these programs and increase our diverse content production across the globe.
We’ll continue to provide regular updates on the work we’re doing in this space. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out with any questions, feedback or suggestions at diversity@canva.com.
