Expanding access to visual design across the enterprise - Canva customers tell their stories

Fast-growing visual design vendor Canva has an enterprise strategy that's straight out of the pages of Clayton Christensen's business classic, The Innovator's Dilemma — appeal to the unmet needs of the broad population who sit outside the inner circle of those with specialist skills and budget. The strategy is working well, based on the testimony of enterprise customers invited by Canva to speak at a briefing with industry analysts in London earlier this year.

As well as ease-of-use, the big unlock for Canva users is that they can edit designs that have been created by professional designers without having to tangle with the complexity — and expense — of a professional design tool. Any Canva design can be edited by any authorized user (now expanded to include even more source formats). At Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP), the world's largest independent Coca-Cola bottler, this means that marketing teams in countries or regions that don't have the same in-house design resources as colleagues elsewhere in the organization, can now adapt centrally produced designs and templates to their own needs without the cost and delay of using external agencies. Indy Borghal, the company's Associate Director, Digital, explains:

In each of the markets, they're now not getting in touch with their local agencies to edit a PSD or an Illustrator file, because they can just go in and do it, so lots of cost savings to be had there. Where we have markets that genuinely don't have any creative or design budget, they're now not asking for it or concerned about it. They have assets available from countries across the globe.

At CRM vendor HubSpot, being able to hand off or automate this kind of work from the core design team has freed up valuable resource for other tasks. Katy Millen, Principal Program Manager at HubSpot, says:

For us, it's very much about the repeatable work that our team isn't having to get involved in, so that the creative team can be more focused on that strategic, high-visibility work that they can actually do, and then the day-to-day is dealt with and supported by Canva.

At enterprise applications vendor SAP, Canva was chosen after an earlier attempt to standardize on a different professional design suite had failed. The company had wanted to wean people off using their own ad-hoc choices such as PowerPoint in order to get more professional results, but users had found the proposed alternative too difficult to learn — an issue that didn't come up with Canva. Darren Folk, Global Creative Lead at SAP, recounts:

We tried a more pro tool, but what we found is, it did solve the problem, having a design system across the company, but then we ran into the adoption problem. When you are proposing a pro tool, when the alternative was PowerPoint, it was really hard, and adoption was struggling. And we got a lot of feedback. So we listened to that feedback.

We talked to Canva, and I think we found that there was almost 10,000 users with SAP email addresses already. So the choice was kind of made for us.

'More with less'

With everyone on a shared platform, it has become much easier to share visual assets, with Canva’s automation capabilities easing the production process. Folk continues:

What we start with is a global English asset. Magic resize gives it to you on all the social platforms automatically, and then bulk create gives it all the languages automatically. So it really is like creating in nine regions, nine times the amount of content in one workflow.

That's been unreal for our little in-house team, because then we can now focus on the upcoming demands of social, which is a lot more video, and that means a lot more resources and a lot more agency budget, [that] we don't have. It's more with less. So we're trying to evolve our social with the same amount of budget. That is the big sell for us.

Borghal also notes the savings and convenience when users can edit video in Canva without having to call on professional equipment or resources:

We in the past would pay £10-20,000 for a two-minute video to be created, filmed, edited and sent back to us. Now, if the social team can do that within the space of a day with an iPhone and access to Canva, [there's] huge savings in that, considering the volume of video content that we're creating.

Alongside broadening access to a wider user population, it's been important to implement brand guidelines in the platform, so that styling such as colors, typefaces and other elements stay consistent with the brand. At HubSpot, the user profile has expanded over the past six years beyond the core marketing team to include sales, customer success and operational teams, so having these controls built into how people use Canva has been crucial. Millen says:

Brand governance is also a big thing for us. It always has been. We wanted to make sure that, if people did make tweaks, they couldn't make changes like typography, to color, all those kind of things that were important for our [brand identity]. But they could make changes to images or copy. So we're making sure that things were very much kept on brand, and as the company grew, we didn't have to be that police force to check everything that was going through the system, but we had that confidence that whatever was delivered was still on-brand.

It's still important to have professional designers creating the initial campaign material, says Borghal, but it makes such a big difference to then have others across the organization who don't have those professional skills to still be able to adapt those designs, within brand guidelines. He comments:

When we are working on big campaigns, you do need a designer to create that campaign. I think there's no getting away from that. I wouldn't want someone who's just been in comms for, you know, a couple of years to think that they're now a designer. It's not inherently just there like that. And so we still do need designers, pureplay designers, to create and have the vision and all of that sort of thing. It's just the delivery of the asset at the end that is coming through Canva to make it easier for us to scale.

With Canva rapidly expanding the AI capabllities in its platform, customers are looking for this to provide more opportunities for automation and scaling within the same controls over output. Folk comments:

My bar for AI has gone up so high lately. As we know, we just see so many use cases of it where it actually doesn't help you. And so what I think for Canva, in our creative teams, it is the unglamorous stuff, and it's in the stuff that takes a lot of time. So it's like editing video. You can take one full take of it, and then it'll cut it automatically into clips. It's background remover. It's Magic Voice, so I know any text on any Canva asset is aligned to our brand voice. So for AI in Canva, it is very much a [case of], 'Let me speed up my job.'

My take

As I noted in my earlier write-up of Canva's EMEA analyst day, Canva's enterprise strategy reminds me of how Salesforce built up its enterprise presence two decades ago — going to central IT buyers with evidence of how many people and teams in the organization were already signed up to the product through their own choice. It then becomes almost a no-brainer to be able to centralize purchasing and then manage who's signing in to use the product and how they represent the brand in their designs — especially when you add in the potential cost savings described above. 

At the time, many thought that a cloud-native startup like Salesforce would never become a serious rival to the likes of established enterprise players like Siebel and Oracle — history has proved them wrong. And Salesforce never achieved organic numbers as big as Canva's — it's astonishing that there were 10,000 users signed up at SAP, almost 10% of the ERP vendor's global workforce, before it even became an officially sanctioned platform. So let's see how Canva's story plays out.

We'll have more from Canva later this week when it holds its Canva Create annual conference — it's worth keeping an eye on.