Audiences today demand engaging, high-quality visual content. And with messages coming at consumers from every direction, it’s more important than ever that your images stand out!
But let us guess: you’re not a graphic designer, you might not have one on staff, and you don’t have a budget to hire one out-of-house. So good design is just plain out of reach for your organization, right?
Wrong.
What if I told you there’s an online design tool out there that makes great design accessible to everyone, not just experienced and trained designers.
Enter: Canva.
What is Canva?
Canva is a 100% online program that allows anyone (yep, anyone) to design presentations, social media graphics, posters, logos, flyers, and much more with thousands of pre-made, professional layouts and an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.
Need to quickly create a graphic to advertise your next event? Canva’s great for that.
How about a flyer that succinctly and beautifully articulates the mission and message of your organization? Canva.
Canva has millions of stock photos, vectors, and illustrations to choose from along with free icons and shapes and hundreds of fonts to make your designs unique. You can even order prints through Canva and take advantage of their Design School which features educational tutorials and courses on graphic design, branding, social media, and more!
Why Canva
For many nonprofit organizations and small businesses, design can be a stressful ordeal unless they employ the help of a professional designer. However, many nonprofits simply don’t have the budget to hire said professional designer. Canva offers a great solution for nonprofits and small businesses to bridge that gap and create beautiful designs in-house, at a cheaper cost.
One of the main reasons we love Canva is that it makes good design accessible to everyone. We believe in empowering our clients and partners with the tools and knowledge to drive their organizations forward. Canva is one such tool that allows us to set our clients up for success, teach them the tool, and let them take it from there.
Canva does offer a free version of their program that is a great place to start dipping your toe in the waters of design. The free version offers you 250,000+ templates, 100+ design types including social media posts, presentations, and letters, and hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics.
For the purposes of this article, though, our strategic recommendation is that your organization invest in Canva’s paid Canva Pro plan. We’re going to explain why we think this is a worthwhile investment of your dollars in a minute and will get to the costs later in the article as well.
Say it again with us: Work Smarter Not Harder
Canva is a tool that embodies one of our mantras here at Atromitos: Work smarter, not harder. One of the main reasons we suggest going with the Canva Pro plan is because of the added features at this level that can really save you time and energy. Below are three of our favorite features:
1. BRAND KITS
One of the best features to make your life easier is the Canva brand kit.
With the Canva Pro subscription, you can set up your own brand kit including your brand colors, fonts (you can even upload a font if you have one), and logos. As the Canva website says, “Brand Kit is your one-stop brand management shop. Anyone in your team can access your pre-set brand fonts, logos, and colors, plus reusable brand templates mean everything is visually on brand, every time, and at every touchpoint.”
It’s so much easier when you are designing to have your exact palette right at your fingertips instead of having to go and find exact color codes when creating something.
2. ONE-CLICK DESIGN MAGIC RESIZE
Imagine: You’ve created a beautiful graphic, sized for Facebook, promoting your upcoming webinar series. You also want to promote it on Twitter, where suggested dimensions for post images are different. And then you would love to make it into a flyer for your colleagues too. Instead of spending time recreating the ad from scratch with different dimensions, wouldn’t it be nice if, with one click, that graphic could be resized and rescaled for the new dimensions?
Well, hold on to your pants, because it can, with Canva’s One-Click Design Magic Resize feature.
Magic Resize takes the guesswork out of resizing designs and documents as the ideal dimensions for each platform are already pre-set into the Canva platform.
3. Templates
We love templates so much they get an exclamation point! Here at Atromitos, we believe that templates are a nonprofit and small business’s best friend. We know that spending time creating solid, easy-to-use templates can save your team SO much time and can go a long way in ensuring that everyone is able to create beautiful documents that convey a consistent, polished brand. As Canva puts it on their website, “Create, set, and forget company templates, making designing accessible, consistent, and simple for everyone in your team.”
Canva is an amazing resource for templates and inspiration by way of examples of different types of design needs your organization might have. You can search by content topics such as “holidays” or “open houses,” or you can search based on the type of document you’re making such as “business pitch” or “invitation.”
Okay, that all sounds great, but get to the numbers.
Canva offers several different pricing options depending on the capabilities you desire or require. You can take a look at a side-by-side comparison of all of their plans here. As we mentioned earlier, we recommend investing in the Canva Pro subscription which comes out to around $120 annually. When you consider that a freelance designer is going to charge between $50-$100 per hour depending on experience or $50 and above per project depending on the complexity, this is a steal!
And if you’re a nonprofit, I have even better news for you. Canva for Nonprofits offers its premium version free to registered nonprofits that apply. Of course, there are some eligibility restrictions that you’ll have to check out before applying, but if you’re a 501(c)(3) organization with proper documentation, it’s worth a shot!
And don’t worry. Canva isn’t paying us to say this (although – Canva, holla at us!). We’re just design professionals and reformed non-profit employees who have been around the block and know firsthand what tools to use to make the best use of your valuable time.
In the end, investing in this tool is investing in the future of your organization. A cohesive brand identity and professional marketing materials add legitimacy to your organization. Even if you are doing amazing work, basic or unattractive materials can make a bad impression on donors or volunteers that you rely on to do your work. Good design makes your work easier in the long run.