Tech Tool Talks - Featuring Canva

Shaun Kulesza -

How Canva can help your nonprofit
Technology is changing very quickly, and it is often challenging to keep up. Some of the new technologies can make a significant impact on your daily tasks, increasing efficiencies and the quality of your end product. No need to reinvent the wheel…we will give you a brief taste of these tech tools so you can decide for yourself if it’s right for you.

In our Tech Tools for Nonprofits webinar series, we’ll share the tools, methods, and technology that we use at ShopRaise that can help your nonprofit up your game and increase relevancy and engagement.

All of the technology tips and tools we’ll discuss in our blog series are utilized in our daily routines. ShopRaise doesn’t receive kickbacks, nor any other incentives from the companies we reference. We pay for these services, and we wanted to share them with you. Best of all, these tools have a program for nonprofits that is either significantly discounted or entirely free.

Introducing Canva
Canva is an online graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents, and other visual content. Using Canva you can create:

  • Social media posts, presentations, posters, ads, flyers, animated gifs, and more
  • Plan, create, schedule, and publish graphics
  • Real-time collaboration
  • Free of charge, or reduced fees for nonprofits

Canva Features
One of the best things about Canva are all of the features that make creating your graphics simple and easy. It really is a one stop shop for design. Here are a few of the features that stand out:

  • The Canva interface – Canva has a simple, intuitive interface where your team can drag and drop assets onto your canvas and easily create your marketing collateral. Even people who have little to no graphic design experience can learn how to create great looking graphics quicky.
  • Layers – Canva operates based on layers. It’s easy to add different elements by dragging and dropping the image onto your canvas. Most images have transparent backgrounds that allow you to overlay them and create simple yet sophisticated designs.
  • Pre-existing templates and images – Canva provides thousands of pre-existing templates and tons of images, graphics, and assets that you can use to create your own designs. Why reinvent the wheel when you can start with a great existing design and refine it to your liking?
  • Managing images – Another great feature of Canva is being able to add and manage your own custom images. Simply uploading your images to your folder makes them easy to organize and access.
  • Removing image backgrounds – Most assets need to have a transparent background in order to alter them to your unique specifications. That step can be tricky for someone who isn’t familiar with graphic design. Canva has a great tool that automatically removes the background for you. No outside program is needed.
  • Add animation – Creating graphics with videos or animated gifs is extremely easy with Canva. You can decide which elements you want to animate and how for how long. Trust us, it’s super easy.
  • Resizing feature – One of the best features of Canva is their intelligent resizing feature. If you create a design in one size (for example 125x90) by using the resize feature, Canva automatically adjusts the location of the elements to fit the new size. What would take a novice hours is literally accomplished in seconds.
  • Collaboration – The collaboration tools are equally as beneficial as the technological ones. From inviting your team to commenting on designs, or even creating a process workflow is extremely easy in the Canva interface.

How ShopRaise uses Canva
Before finding Canva, we used a traditional graphic design workflow using the Adobe suite and other graphics software. Our graphic design was limited to a few team members that had the skill set to use these programs which severely limited our creativity and flexibility. This bottleneck was especially felt when one of our graphic design team members was not available.

Likely similar to your organization, ShopRaise has many graphic design needs including:

  • Email images
  • Online advertisements (think banners in multiple sizes and dimensions)
  • Printable marketing pieces like flyers and posters
  • Online assets (think social media images that require different sizes or overlays)
  • Conference and event collateral

When our team started looking for a new solution to manage or graphical needs, Canva stood out as a way to decrease our reliance on older technologies that are often costly and almost always require a specialized skill set.

If you would like to learn more about Canva for Nonprofits you can watch our Tech Tool Talks webinar here.

You can also checkout Canva for Nonprofits here.

If you want to know more about our program check out  https://www.ShopRaise.com or Signup for a Demo.