Behind the Lens: Producing Diverse Content

As a service used by millions of people around the world, we strongly believe in the huge responsibility we have to champion diversity, inclusion and representation across every aspect of our work. Every day, people from all over the world come to Canva to bring their creative vision to life, and as our platform continues to grow, so too does our responsibility in this area.

As with every part of Canva, we’re constantly learning and we acknowledge that there’s always more we can do to continue improving in a variety of ways. When our community lets us know they expect more from us, we’re eager to sit up, listen and take action towards improving not only tomorrow but forever into the future.

Over the last few days, we’ve had a number of questions about how we work with creatives to produce content. In this post, I wanted to take the opportunity to address some of those questions, gather feedback from people affected by this, and outline a few of the immediate actions we’re taking to ensure we’re continuing to champion a diverse and inclusive content library while amplifying and supporting the creatives we work with around the world.

What we’re doing in this area

Our contributor photography program has expanded at an accelerated rate over the last two years, growing from a handful of photographers into a global operation of thousands who help to improve the variety and diversity of content available in Canva. To support the ongoing task of creating a diverse and representative content library, we also supplement our contributor program with production vendors who take on specific briefs to help fill gaps in our library.

As this production program continues to evolve and scale, we’re undertaking a series of new initiatives aimed at equitably supporting all kinds of creators:

Rolling out a new, standardized payment system for content production

We’ll be launching this to our content producers by the end of the month and will continue to seek out feedback on scaling and adapting this system moving forward.

Finding new ways to engage with diverse creators

We’ll be bolstering the outreach we’ve kicked off to find new veins of underrepresented creators with a more structured program and additional resourcing. We’re currently in the process of canvassing all of the different ways in which we can continue improving in this area and reaching out to more creators. We’re looking forward to stepping up our work in this area and continuing to work with diverse creators from all walks of life

We’d love your thoughts and suggestions in this area. If you have suggestions for creators who we should be talking to we would love to hear from you via our feedback form.

Making diverse content more discoverable

Having great content is only half of the equation – the other half is ensuring people are able to find it. Part of the Canva experience is being able to find the right content when you need it, and our search algorithms work in tandem with our content library to help enable this. Over the last few months, we’ve made a significant investment in improving the search experience and are experimenting with a number of additional ways to continue surfacing more diverse content across Canva which we’ll be rolling out over the next couple of weeks.

Increasing our opportunities for in-product feedback

Community feedback has always been our most important learning tool. As our content library continues to grow, we’ll be implementing a number of new ways to let us know if the content you’re seeing doesn’t meet the mark. This direct and real-time feedback will help our content teams to directly improve those parts of our library.

Spotlighting new and diverse creators

We’ll be amplifying the ways we spotlight the talent of new and diverse creators through our regular ‘Photographer Spotlight’ emails as well as new creator discovery pages to be launched soon.

Your feedback matters – we’d love to hear from you

We’re nothing without the perspectives, feedback, and support of our diverse community. You have always been our most powerful learning tool as we continue to improve and scale Canva around the world.

We believe the best solutions come from an ever-open and evolving dialogue and we’re grateful for the ongoing feedback and conversations around the way we operate and how we can continue to improve our processes as Canva grows.

This work remains an ongoing priority for us, so we’ve created a specific channel where you can reach out to us directly with your suggestions, thoughts, questions, or ideas in this space. This feedback will help to shape the additional improvements that we would like to roll out over the next few weeks. We’re grateful to have such a diverse and passionate community supporting and inspiring us to be better each and every day.

– Cameron Adams, cofounder and Chief Product Officer