Empowering every team to collaborate with Canva
From today, we’re excited to be rolling out a number of new features designed to empower every kind of team to bring their creative vision to life.
When the global pandemic hit, millions of people around the world turned to new ways of working as brick and mortar businesses pivoted to unique online environments and the majority of the world adapted to the challenges of remote collaboration while working from home.
In 2013 we launched Canva with the goal of empowering the world to design. Since then, we’ve seen countless examples of inspiring and unique ways teams around the world have been able to kickstart their dreams, grow their businesses and collaborate together in a remote environment. Today, this collaboration is more important than ever as teams of all sizes adapt to the future of work.
Introducing Canva for Teams
Behind every team using Canva is a unique story and creative vision — from friends launching side hustles, marketing teams collaborating on product launches, nonprofits building their latest fundraising campaigns, or small businesses growing into global brands. While we might not be able to gather around a shared whiteboard or sketch together at a conference table, we’ve been working behind the scenes to make remote collaboration a seamless experience.
From today, we’re excited to be rolling out a number of new features designed to empower every kind of team to bring their vision to life. Whether it’s turning concepts into pitch decks, collaborating on social media posts for your latest marketing campaign, or bringing your classroom to life in a digital environment.
Design, Share, and Comment in Real-Time
With millions of us adapting to remote work and learning environments, the need for real-time visual collaboration is now more critical than ever — from remote classrooms sharing ideas over online brainstorming sessions through to marketing teams building their latest campaigns remotely.
Now more than ever, teams of all sizes are looking for new ways to get things done in sync. Grace Riek in the United States is a perfect example of how this collaboration can empower all kinds of teams. As the editor of her student’s newspaper, Grace had been searching for a tool where she and her team of writers and designers could collaborate on the newspaper in sync, rather than making manual and individual contributions.
Grace fired off an email to our co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins with her suggestion and was thrilled to learn that it was a feature we’d already kicked off behind the scenes. We loved her enthusiasm and the story of her team so much that we flew her out to Sydney where she met with our engineering and product teams to share her input and her own important use case for the feature.
Today, we’re excited to be rolling out real-time collaboration for every team using Canva. Whether you’re working on a student newspaper of your own, brainstorming as a team, or jamming on a group project, these new collaboration features will empower every team to bring their creativity to life from anywhere in the world — in real-time.
Engage Remote Audiences with Talking Presentations
Keeping your audience engaged can be tricky at the best of times. Throw in distributed work or learning environments and the difficulty only increases. Whether you’re presenting the latest board update with a webcam, or creating distance learning resources for a digital classroom, keeping your audience interested and engaged has become a new challenge for just about everyone.
With millions of classrooms around the world shifting from physical learning spaces to distributed online environments, creating resources that resonate and engage with different types of learners is becoming more difficult than ever before.
From today, we’re excited to be launching a brand new presentation mode to turn any presentation into an interactive and engaging experience. Whether you’re building creative online learning resources, creating your next conference keynote, or looking for new ways to create interactive remote experiences, Canva’s new Talking Presentations is designed with the goal of turning every presentation into an engaging experience by letting the presenter embed short videos to narrate and talk through their slides.
Stay on Brand with Multiple Brand Kits
Turning what was once a concept into a successful business is no easy feat — from building a social media presence to establishing brand guidelines, successfully growing great ideas requires an extraordinary amount of creativity, collaboration and persistence.
For business duo Shannon and Misty, the ability to collaborate on their designs and build the foundation of their brand with Canva played a pivotal role in taking their dream from a storage room concept to a nationally franchised brand.
In 2014, the DIY-savvy pair took the first step in turning their concept into what would become the first of many ‘Nailed It’ locations — starting their initial art and craft studio in the back of a storage room with the bare essentials, a crazy big idea and the ambition to make it happen. The pair got to work on building a name for themselves through running local community workshops and events which were shared on social media. Soon after, the concept caught on and the number of workshops increased.
While the pair have been collaborating since day one, the need has only grown stronger as the brand continues to grow across the country. As their business continues to expand into more than 26 franchise locations across the United States, they’re now taking on the next challenge in their journey as they look to continue scaling their brand while empowering each of their franchise owners to create their own designs and marketing material without manual approval processes or lengthy brand guidelines.
We know that maintaining your brand while collaborating on designs in a remote environment has been a new and unprecedented challenge for the vast majority of teams. So we’re excited to be launching multiple brand kits for every team using Canva. Whether you’re building a national franchise or just getting started, anyone in your team can now jump in and start designing while effortlessly staying on brand and in sync.
Streamline Collaboration with Notifications Centre
Collaboration has undoubtedly become more challenging as many teams shift to remote work environments — throw in rapid growth, multiple time zones and overlapping projects; and the need for effective collaboration becomes more important than ever.
Sean Greenhalgh experienced this challenge first-hand after launching his startup TimeChi at the height of the pandemic. An avid fan of all things hardware and technology, Sean and his team embarked on a bold mission after deciding to double down on their original plan to launch their time-saving startup despite the closure of their office and newfound difficulties as a result of the pandemic. With his team now working across multiple locations and various time zones, Sean found Canva to be a saving grace.
Designing and launching a full-scale marketing campaign can be a daunting task for even the most experienced experts, let alone a distributed team preparing their first major product launch. It was in these situations that Sean found collaboration to be more important than ever. While he was able to share designs and leave comments and feedback for his team, it was easy for these updates to get lost amongst the overlapping priorities that come along with launching a startup with a remote team.
In light of the rapid shift towards remote working and distributed collaboration, we’re excited to be introducing a new feature to make both communication and collaboration a breeze for every team. Whether you’re launching a startup of your own, leaving feedback on the latest marketing campaign or sharing designs with other team members, our new Notifications Centre is the next step in turning Canva into a truly collaborative platform.
Once switched on, our new Notifications Centre takes the guesswork out of keeping your team moving in the same direction with a new central hub for notifications, instantly notifying your team whenever they’re tagged in a comment, requesting approval on a design or sharing new files. We’re looking forward to introducing this new feature to every team using Canva, starting with our Canva for Enterprise teams this November.
Final Thoughts
The last few months have been unforeseeably challenging for teams of all sizes — from adapting to collaboration in a remote environment to keeping teams aligned and on brand or pivoting brick and mortar businesses to new online environments.
We’re constantly amazed and inspired by the countless examples of teams using Canva to bring their vision to life. From entrepreneurial duos launching their side hustles to students collaborating on school newspapers, classrooms brainstorming in a distributed learning environment and small businesses growing to meet increased demand.
The launch of Canva for Teams marks an important step in our journey as we double down on building a truly collaborative product for every kind of team. Whether you’re building a global brand, starting a school newspaper, designing remote learning resources or collaborating on a marketing campaign, we’re looking forward to empowering every team around the world to bring their creative vision to life.
