Celebrating more than 400,000 nonprofits using Canva

Visual communication has become an essential tool for nonprofits to educate, inspire, and mobilize the world toward positive change. Images and design are incredibly powerful in conveying complex messages in a simple, emotive way that captures people's attention and drives them to take action. From eye-catching posters to viral social media campaigns, it’s critical for nonprofits to harness the power of visual communication to ensure their messages are heard and their impact is communicated.

We also know nonprofit organizations face significant constraints on their time and budgets, and having access to affordable design resources and expertise is a common challenge for any grassroots organization. At Canva, our value of ‘be a force for good’ has been an integral part of our mission, our culture, and our overall company DNA from the beginning. That’s why, as part of our two-step plan, we launched Canva for Nonprofits in 2015, providing free access to our paid product, and offering educational workshops to help nonprofits develop their marketing and visual communication skills.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce an incredible milestone in our journey to empower nonprofits as we celebrate more than 400,000 nonprofit organizations, with 1.5 million team members, now using Canva! The number of nonprofit organizations on our Canva for Nonprofits program has more than doubled year-on-year, and we couldn’t be more proud to see our nonprofit community growing.

To scale our impact community even further, as part of our Canva for Nonprofits program, we also recently increased the number of free seats in our nonprofit plan to 50 people per eligible nonprofit. And with the launch of Canva for Teams, nonprofits can now unlock even more helpful features to collaborate with team members on their Canva for Nonprofits plan.

Empowering nonprofits

One of our key Canva Foundation focus areas is to empower nonprofits through Canva to help achieve their goals – because we know doing so can exponentially amplify their impact and accelerate real change. Our crazy big goal is to empower every nonprofit with the tools and resources to become more effective at achieving the world's goals.

To understand what nonprofits need to succeed, we recently ran a survey of more than 3,500 nonprofit Canva users – the largest to date. These organizations were of many sizes, but regardless of size, the feedback was consistent.

We heard loud and clear that visual communication skills like storytelling, digital marketing, and knowing how to use Canva effectively are crucial, with 60% of respondents citing they needed to improve design skills to achieve their goals for this year’s projects. That’s why we also host workshops and training sessions, building educational content to help nonprofits upskill and get the most out of our free product offer. Nonprofits are welcomed to our nonprofit program with an onboarding course made up of bite-sized videos to familiarize themselves with Canva and get the most value out of our platform. We’ve also created a series of webinars with topics ranging from effective storytelling, to how to leverage social media to increase impact. Nonprofits can also access resources like crisis toolkits to assist with responding to crises as fast as possible, marketing toolkits, and even a suite of billboard templates.

Our survey also highlighted how valuable time-saving tools are for nonprofits, where employees often wear multiple hats and juggle many competing priorities. Our nonprofits shared their wishlists for further automated features and seamless integration with other platforms to help with simplified workflows and increased speeds of content creation – which in some emergency situations, can make the difference between life and death.

Stories of impact

400,000 is a big number – and while it's easy to get lost in numbers, this number also represents more than 400,000 stories of change and impact. We’re incredibly proud of the global community of nonprofits who come together through their use of Canva to help make the world a better place. Here’s how Canva has helped some of them create impact.

GivingTuesday

It's truly amazing to see the incredible impact that GivingTuesday, the world's largest generosity movement, has had on millions of people around the globe. What started as an annual day in 2012 has launched into a year-round giving event that’s celebrated in more than 80 nations and over 100 languages. Now in its 10th year, GivingTuesday is driven by the force of social media and has raised billions of dollars for charities globally. One of the keys to GivingTuesday's success has been to capture the hearts and minds of people around the world by making campaign assets available in Canva for its global community members to easily download and instantly share on social media year-round.

As a small but nimble team needing to produce a lot of engaging content quickly for a number of platforms and in multiple languages, GivingTuesday introduced Canva for Nonprofits in 2020 to give staff a hub for their visual materials. Canva became the centralized design tool for remote teams to share content, allowing it to scale quickly and consistently.

And the results have been nothing short of extraordinary: In 2021 alone, the GivingTuesday campaign raised over US $2.78B in just 24 hours and garnered over 20 billion impressions across social media platforms worldwide.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is an incredible organization dedicated to making a difference in the lives of those affected by suicide.

Online and visual resources are an important part of improving education and awareness around mental health, which AFSP uses in its community programs, developing suicide prevention through research and advocacy, and providing support for those affected by suicide. It's inspiring to see how they’ve scaled Canva across the entire organization, empowering local teams to design while maintaining brand consistency with the use of templates, brand kits, and real-time collaboration features.

And the addition of Canva to their design mix has had a truly impressive impact – AFSP has been able to save 200 hours of design work for their community programs and events each year. In its three years of using Canva, the organization has successfully unlocked the creativity of its staff and volunteers while making workflows more time and cost-efficient.

Supercharging positive change

We’re extraordinarily proud to share just some of the stories of the nonprofit organizations using Canva, and are constantly inspired by the ways they're using the power of design to create positive change.

We know even small actions can make a big difference, and we hope that by providing access to the premium features of Canva, we can continue amplifying the impact of incredible nonprofits and their contributions to important causes around the world.

Are you a nonprofit? Sign up for Canva for Nonprofits here.