Background

The Philadelphia Eagles are one of the NFL’s oldest and most storied franchises, selling out stadiums and winning games since 1933. After 90 years in the league, the Eagles have amassed more than 20 million fans worldwide. With Canva, the Eagles connect and engage with their passionate fanbase, creating strong visuals to make their brand soar.

The Challenge

Running a successful football team is a high-stakes game that stretches far beyond the end zone. While the players are sweating it out on the field, there is a team working behind the scenes and up in the stands to make sure the Eagles win big off the field, on the road, and out in the community.

Brian Napoli is the Philadelphia Eagles’ Vice President of Corporate Partnerships, and he knows just how important that community can be — he’s been living and breathing the Eagles since he was a boy.

“One of the most remarkable things about our franchise is the fandom,” Brian says. “It's passed down from generation to generation — I'm lucky enough to be raised in the Philadelphia area and was a huge Eagles fan from a very young age.”

Today the Eagles community spans the country and the globe, with 10 million fans stateside and millions more internationally. These fans are hungry for Eagles content, to deepen their engagement with the players and fellow fans, and create a richer experience on game day and beyond.

The team’s branding is a big part of that experience, what Brian describes as the franchise’s “powerhouse”.

“The Eagles logo evokes emotion, it evokes passion. It symbolizes a lot of key values to the organization and to the team itself: strength, hard work, family, a sense of community,” he says.

For any modern sporting franchise, maintaining brand quality and integrity at every level of the organization is a big job, from internal communications and brand partnerships to marketing and game day. Then there are the millions of followers who flock to the Eagles’ social media feeds for the latest updates.

“The world has become more visual and more on demand,” Brian says. “Our fans expect digital and social platforms to deliver important news quickly and efficiently, and also entertain.”

With a large team working in a fast-paced environment, Brian and the Eagles needed an accessible set of tools to feed and grow engagement, while maintaining the quality and value of the Eagles’ brand.

The Solution

In 2021 Canva was added to the Eagles’ playbook and it quickly proved a game-changer across the company, particularly in the Sales, Marketing, PR, and Community Relations teams.

Erica Sorrels is the Eagles Activation and Partner Solutions Manager, so she has a front-row seat to the special relationship between the team, fans, and stakeholders. She’s seen Canva become a versatile, one-stop platform that helps her work smarter and more creatively.

“With Canva we were able to create a Teams account and provide access across the organization,” Erica says.

“This has allowed us to empower our team while also managing the brand. By having this tool, we’re easily able to create and share visual content and collaborate with each other.”

With one shared platform, and a consistent set of tools and assets, the Eagles team can grow the scale and impact of their creative work, without sacrificing the quality and professionalism that fans and the community expect.

Safeguarding the Eagles brand

Canva empowers Erica and her colleagues to be as bold and dynamic as their teammates on the field, without dropping the ball when it comes to brand integrity.

“Canva remains open in my browser all day long,” she says. “One of my favorite features within Canva is the Brand Kit. This feature allows us to easily share our brand assets and guidelines, logos, fonts, colors.

“Our brand is an important part of who we are as a team, but it also helps us connect with our fans, partners, the community, so it is important that it's represented accurately.”

With Canva for Teams, Erica and her teammates can easily drag and drop the Eagles’ logo and brand colors into presentations and documents confidently creating professional-looking on-brand content at speed.

“I work on a lot of our department collateral and events as well as partner initiatives,” Erica says. “So the library of templates allows me to search until I hit that creative spark and I'm able to quickly get started.”

“Canva ultimately makes us more nimble,” Brian adds. “For me, it creates a higher level of confidence that our communication standards are upheld.”

Bringing the team together

Whether they’re in the office or on the road during away games, Canva empowers the Philadelphia Eagles team to create and collaborate on visual documents including presentations, agendas, itineraries, invitations, posters, and signage.

“Canva gives us confidence that our brand is being represented properly,” Brian says.

“As a result, it frees up time for a lot of people to focus on the content within those materials, to spend time collaborating together on creative ideas that help bring our partnerships to life, and create even more time for our sales team.”

Erica and her colleagues are always on the same page even when they’re not together. With Canva, they can work efficiently and collaborate on presentations and whiteboard brainstorms.

“Canva provides the perfect opportunity for us to brainstorm together, build out these concepts and share them at once,” Erica says.

Brian has also been impressed with how Canva brought their team together.

“Canva provides the security that our branded assets are safe and accessible,” he says.

“No matter if we are traveling or working from home, our team has the ability to access, edit and collaborate as efficiently as we normally would in the office.”

Embracing fan power

In 2022, the Eagles piloted a new initiative with Canva that empowered fans to show off their own creativity and passion to design custom t-shirts.

“One of our goals with Canva was to create more unique and innovative ways to engage our fan base,” Erica says. “This season, we were excited to launch a promotion that allowed fans the opportunity to engage with the Eagles brand within Canvaby designing custom t-shirts to be worn on the field during pre-game.”

For diehard Eagles fans accustomed to donning their favorite players’ jerseys, seeing their own creations on game day at Lincoln Financial Field was a big moment.

“This is a first-of-its-kind promotion, one that allows fans to showcase not only their love of the team, but their creative side,” Erica says. “We're excited to partner with Canva on more projects for the upcoming seasons.”

It’s just the start of what Erica hopes to achieve with Canva.

“Canva gives us a new way to connect with and empower our fans to fly,” Erica says.

“Go Birds!”