Each time we conduct a wave of research with our SMEs, there are new learnings, new insights, new stories. And occasionally there are new hero-brands that we really haven’t stumbled across before. Enter Canva.
Anyone who has read the business pages of the newspaper has heard of Canva … and the brand has been around for some years now … but a lot of people do not understand the Canva proposition. (I certainly didn’t). Listening to a few business owners talk about Canva – and how it has transformed their business – has been eye-opening. When you hear business owners – some of whom are pretty tough operators – use terms like … ‘the best website on the internet’ … ‘life-changing’ … ‘a really good platform’ … ‘amazing’ … ‘very intuitive’ … ‘graphic design for dummies’ … and ‘really good’ … you sit back and take notice.
So, as we limp our way to Christmas, get some energy from the Canva-love of business owners …
“The standout product that has a real impact on our ability to deliver our work is Canva. That piece of software – where at the price-point it’s at – has essentially alleviated 90% of our need for Adobe products at around 20% of the cost. Whereas previously I was trying to manage Adobe licences at $70-$90 a month, and share them, it’s now like ‘everyone can have Canva, let’s get it on, we can centrally store our templates’. One of our businesses is essentially producing all of its content with in Canva, on a daily basis. Canva enables us to take content from a word document and turn it into customer-ready, fully-branded, social media-ready content. It’s life-changing for us … Once you go and use their presentation software, I’d say that within 2-3 hours of starting to use it you’d never go back to PowerPoint. It looks better and feels better.” (Media, 9 FTEs)
“The core, fundamental program of this entire operation is Canva. We were extremely early-adopters of Canva, almost 5 years ago and the whole of it was for us to have journalists anywhere in the country and for them to be able to report. That is, for them to be able to design a story on their phone. So we’ll never hire a designer, it’s part of every journalist’s job to be able to design their own stories. It’s the best website on the internet. We do all our investor pitch-decks on it, we do all our reporting, we do graphs and visual representations of data on it, we design ads on it, brand-identity kits – EVERYTHING is done on Canva … It’s $100 a year per seat and so it’s $400 or $500 a year so it’s extremely cheap. And we put it under a lot of strain, if a story broke right now, we’d expect to have a story up in 10 minutes. I was at a gig at the Opera House when Prince Phillip died – it was 945 pm – and by 950 pm we had a post up. And we were doing it under the seat, on our phones, in the auditorium. And that’s thanks to Canva … Canva encourages you to make a brand guideline within the app. So when we open a new document it already has pre-set our colours, our fonts, our logos, everything – really easy for everyone in our team to access – and only I can change them.” (Media, 7 FTEs)
“You can schedule posts which is really good – I use Canva which is like graphic design for dummies – my husband has a graphic design degree, and I can pretty much do it quicker than him. You can create posts and then share straight to your social media from there within the subscription that you have … My husband has all these big programs to do all this fancy stuff to make logos and move backgrounds and I can do it all with the click of a button now. And he’s like ‘wow this is amazing’.” (Online Retail, Sole Trader)
“Canva is a really good platform that I’ve used – they’ve helped me to do all my social media posts. I don’t have a designer background, so it’s really hard to work out how to use Photoshop and all these other really advanced tools. Canva is more of a simplified version of that ... I don’t need to read instruction manuals or contact support to figure anything out. It was just very intuitive and I really like online tools and platforms that are just intuitive to use, because my time investment is a big thing, and if I have to invest the time to figure out how to use it, it really puts me off.” (Online tea merchant, Sole Trader)
Conclusion
Not only is ‘good tech’ emerging all the time, but the willingness of SMEs to embrace it is growing just as quickly. If they were in any doubt, the past two years has shown business owners what tech can do for their business – and they want more of it.
Please have a well-earned break in the weeks ahead.
