About Arch Amenities Group

Arch Amenities Group⁠(opens in a new tab or window) is a premier provider of wellness-focused amenities management and consulting services. They cater to commercial and residential properties, including hotels and resorts, spas, private fitness cetners, clubs and recreation spaces worldwide.

Summary

• In short: Canva enables Arch Amenities Group to create brand consistency across the company and manage both content and creative.
• Canva features used: Brand Kit, Websites, Magic Switch, Magic Write, Background Remover, tables, charts, printing.

ROI:

• Arch Amenities Group increased the capacity of its internal design resources and drove operational efficiencies after implementing Canva.
• Turnaround time on a single design asset reduced by 87%.
• Arch Amenities Group spends 70% less time searching for stock images with Canva’s free media library.
• Reduced creative editing time by 90%.
• Turnaround time for direct printing materials, like business cards, has been reduced.

The Challenge

Before adopting Canva, Arch Amenities Group grappled with inefficient workflows.

Supporting over 100 clients across the globe, the company’s marketing team and in-house designers were constantly creating templates for customers from scratch, often using multiple tools or advanced design software.

This led to large work bottlenecks and complicated, time-consuming approval processes, since the team was forced to share designs across desktop applications given not all clients had access or knowledge to use the same programs.

“Before Canva, half my week was spent making edits and managing versions of projects,” says Shannon Reinhart, Senior Graphic Designer. “Now, I have more time to work on concepting and building our client’s brands and developing new templates, rather than managing the process, I can focus on creative improvements and innovation.”

The Solution

The turning point came when several team members discovered Canva as a simple solution to solve its problems.

“A member of our team was utilizing a free, personal Canva account to create social media posts, and we discovered several of our clients were utilizing free accounts, as well,” says Mary Simpkins, Senior Director of Marketing.

Several managers at Arch Amenities Group were also active users, and the VP of Marketing identified potential in using Canva within the business.

A company merger in 2021 fast-tracked the Canva rollout since teams within that organization were also using the design platform.

“This gave us comfort knowing the platform could work for a large-scale company with many brands to service. We saw Canva as a simple and scalable solution as part of our growing business needs, and were inspired to learn more about the enterprise functionality, which honestly, exceeded our expectations.”

Transforming the onboarding process

Transitioning the entire company to Canva was a smooth process.

Canva’s Customer Success team facilitated the migration of old desktop documents to new, ready-to-edit Canva templates.

Arch Amenities Group teams attended routine Canva training sessions to discover how to use the self-serve platform and harness its full potential.

“A huge bonus for us was having that additional support from the Canva team. We have a much larger marketing team but when we first onboarded with Canva, we had five people on our team and fewer resources,” says Mary.

During these sessions, Arch Amenities Group employees learned how to autonomously create unique Brand Kits, which included each brand’s logos, fonts, and color schemes, as well as custom templates tailored to the diverse needs of its clients, without relying on the Brand team.

“Instead of digging through 50,000 folders, I now have the ability to search for a file quickly and pull it up,” says Mary. “I can search for specific items on our account and even discover similar items, instead of starting from scratch.”

“Our employees’ familiarity with branding and graphic design varies greatly, and the user-friendly interface of Canva allows us to easily share professionally-designed content with all of our sites, ensuring our marketing materials are tailored.”

Canva’s intuitive editing tools have reduced the time spent on edits by a remarkable 90%.

Consolidating design resources in Canva

The benefits of adopting Canva as an all-in-one visual communications platform extended beyond creating a unified look with the Brand Kit.

“Canva has become our marketing hub, and that's how we're referring to it internally to encourage the staff to become super users,” says Mary.

Arch Amenities Group set up its central marketing hub within Canva, providing employees with one-stop access to internal playbooks, templates, and programming plans within an organized system of folders.

“Now that we have the majority of our branded templates and materials living in Canva, we’ve built out our marketing plans for the year using a Canva template,” Mary adds.

Following the merger, Arch Amenities Group explored Canva Print capabilities for select collateral and business cards, reducing the need for third-party vendors.

Canva helped to streamline the printing process for business cards, cutting production timelines by facilitating on-demand order capabilities.

Arch Amenities Group further consolidated its usage by transitioning client profiles over to Canva Websites, making it easier for teams and customers to access.

“As our company has grown, we brought over 90 new accounts into our portfolio,” says Nisha Patel, Senior Marketing Manager.

“Canva had just launched the Website feature, so we made individual web pages for each of our accounts. We were able to create a master website template and allow each brand to duplicate it and input their own information.”

With Canva, the Arch Amenities Group team has more time to create custom templates and websites for clients, reducing collateral design time for fitness, spa, and other amenity clients from days or weeks to a few hours.

“Creating websites in Canva has given us the ability to fill out information, source images and compose text for clients all in one place,” adds Shannon. “This has resulted in major time savings for us.”

How Canva helps power productivity

By streamlining workflows and removing internal bottlenecks, Canva has helped Arch Amenities Group grow and support all sites.

“I used to be pulled in to help with designs because team members would be overwhelmed with volume,” says Mary. “But now, I am rarely needed because we’re able to manage the workflow so much more effectively with Canva, and we’ve tripled our portfolio and clients since then. I’ve gone from 50% of my time being taken up by design tasks and related communication, to less than 5% of my time.”

Previously, client communication occurred via email, resulting in slower responses and longer project timelines.

With Canva's real-time collaboration feature, teams can communicate directly with clients within a Canva template, fast-tracking approvals and turnaround times.

“We can provide a client with a Canva template that they have the responsibility of completing, and Arch Amenities Group Marketing assists with final formatting and proofreading,” says Shannon. “The process is streamlined, with less frequent email communication and more collaboration via Canva.

The use of Canva’s Microsoft Teams app integration⁠(opens in a new tab or window) also fast-tracks the team’s response time to requests, ensuring that they do not miss any important notifications.

Canva's approval workflows provide an extra layer of quality control before designs are published, guaranteeing the production of high-quality, on-brand marketing materials every time.

“Now, we spend approximately 30 minutes or less on a single flyer for one client – a time-saving of approximately three hours and 30 minutes. As we continue to build our library of templates, the amount of time spent per project continues to decrease.”

Canva's content library and image editing features have also cut down design time. With thousands of images available at their fingertips, the Arch team no longer needs to spend hours searching for specific visuals, resulting in a 70% reduction in image, video, and graphic sourcing.

“We used to rely on different stock agencies for our designs,” says Mary.

“Whereas now we use the content library directly integrated within Canva to pull from while we’re in a design document, as opposed to going somewhere else to download, resize, and edit.

The rise of AI-powered productivity tools

The Smart Crop and Resize & Magic Switch features allow the team to effortlessly crop and resize images to fit designs, eliminating the need for complex manual edits.

“Every year, our average spa property would update their menus two or three times, which would take a total of four hours in our original software,” says Shannon. “If you add that time up over a year, for as many properties as we manage, I would be spending around three weeks updating menus for our portfolio."

Magic Write also allows the Arch Amenities Group team to summarize wordy documents, generate social captions, and brainstorm concepts within minutes.

What used to consume half of the designer's day now only takes up 5% of their time, allowing them to focus on essential aspects of the business.

Real-time collaboration is changing the way teams work

Canva Whiteboards has revolutionized how Arch Amenities Group shares information with employees, clients, and vendors. Team members can create and revise designs in real-time, fostering an interactive environment for creativity and innovation.

Canva’s Comment feature also facilitates seamless teamwork by allowing teams to communicate on projects from anywhere in the world.

“Notifications have been useful, because getting updates via Comments has prompted a lot of people to jump into a design and act faster as opposed to feedback getting lost in an email,” adds Mary.

“Whiteboards are a great way to engage with your team. It's a great way to host one-on-one meetings, even internally. We hope to leverage them much more,” says Mary.

How Canva contributes to success and savings

Canva's collection of time-saving tools like PDF Import, Gradients, Background Remover, Frames, Tables, and Smart Mockups has resulted in considerable cost savings for Arch Amenities Group.

Since implementing Canva, Mary admits Arch Amenities Group has relied less on external production resources.

“Canva has saved us on staffing costs because the platform has become part of our ‘virtual’ team,” she says.

But above all else, Canva's personalized website templates have had a profound impact on Arch Amenities Group’s rebranding initiatives.

The company saves up to $25 per custom site each month, and $270 per month on web hosting.