- How Canva powered Zoom in a time of hypergrowth
How Canva powered Zoom in a time of hypergrowth
In a time of rapid growth, Zoom turned to Canva as a visual communications solution as it expanded across global markets, increasing efficiencies, ensuring brand consistency, and empowering its teams along the way.
Millions of people around the world are intimately familiar with Zoom. Throughout the global pandemic that unfolded in 2020, it was almost impossible not to witness their video communication platform skyrocket in popularity as people shifted from physical conference rooms to home offices across the globe. The already well-known brand quickly found itself a household name, becoming an invaluable way for millions of people to stay connected with their families, colleagues, classrooms, and friends — including us here at Canva. And with remote and hybrid environments now firmly entrenched in our work culture and the use of video communication now second nature, Zoom is a brand that’s here to stay.
This abrupt hypergrowth saw Zoom leap from an average of approximately 10 million users in late 2019 to around 300 million by April 2020. Zoom’s 2,400 employees at the start of the pandemic quickly surged to over 6,000 globally as product adoption soared. Such a jump also saw the need to quickly build more infrastructure across several company departments — a crucial one being brand marketing, to mitigate the very real risk of inconsistencies across creative assets, in multiple markets, due to the influx of design requests as the marketing team worked to keep up with the pace of the company’s expansion.
“We operated great as a small company. We considered ourselves a big startup with about 2,400 people at that time, and there were a lot of really good things that worked well,” Zoom’s Creative Manager Brandon Realmonte told us. “Once you more than double that number, that obviously causes some holes.”
Zoom's platform grew exponentially as remote work became the norm
Even as the creative team expanded, Zoom needed a visual communication platform that would empower staff from other teams to create their own designs that were on-brand, as bottlenecks occurred due to a mounting volume of design jobs both big and small. Social media posts, custom branded Zoom backgrounds, and posters for internal events were competing with large-scale out-of-home branded marketing campaigns.
With this rapid growth, Zoom was looking for an end-to-end visual communication platform to support its growth, protect brand identity, and streamline workflows to free up the creative team’s time.
After trying Canva, Brandon saw how quickly and easily it could help produce professional-looking designs. Canva’s mission is to empower anyone, anywhere in the world to design with its intuitiveness and ease of use — however, its ability to create sophisticated, professional-looking collateral also impressed even the more experienced graphic designers at Zoom.
“Everyone on my team definitely loves Canva and sees it as an invaluable design tool, and not just for inexperienced designers,” Brandon said.
Today, Brandon and his team are using Canva across Zoom globally. There are more than 100 staff members collaborating on Canva Teams(opens in a new tab or window) including the Social Media, Digital, Marketing, Sales, and other internal teams, with more teams in more markets soon to follow.
Safeguarding the Zoom brand
Ensuring uniformity across both internal and external creative assets was important for Zoom as the company scaled. Adopting a centralized Canva solution across the business has created a self-serve system where Zoom employees around the world can access templates created by the creative team and make simple edits to assets such as branded Zoom backgrounds, social media ads, and sales documents all while staying totally on-brand.
Being able to edit template permission levels, in addition to utilizing the custom Zoom Brand Kit to control how assets are used, has reduced the risk of staff creating designs that don’t reflect the brand — ultimately meaning peace of mind for Brandon and his team!
Zoom's Brand Kit in Canva ensures consistency across assets
Efficiency through empowerment
As Zoom’s popularity exploded, hundreds of requests for similar templates from various teams were causing time-consuming holdups.
“We were doing virtual backgrounds for, say, 12 people for an event, but there could be about 20 of those events a month, so you're looking at hundreds of designs,” Brandon explained.
“So I tasked one of my designers with: how do you make this as scalable as possible? So you have to do five minutes of work and they can go do a few hours of work?”
Empowering staff to easily access and update approved branded assets has not only helped create efficiencies for the creative team but the wider Zoom team’s workflows too – gone is the need to brief creative teams for every minor tweak and labor over review cycles.
Partnering in growth
By reducing the amount of time spent on repetitious smaller jobs, Zoom’s creative team can now focus on more sophisticated design work or brand campaigns.
Wendy Bergh, leader of Zoom’s online business and based in the company’s San Jose headquarters, said she sees how our visual communication platform can unlock creativity, helping to turbocharge the company’s global growth.
While Zoom continues to grow, Brandon’s planning to build out a full suite of Zoom-branded templates using Canva Teams. Eventually, his vision is to establish an integrated system across more sections of the global business, to help empower even more employees at Zoom to unlock their creativity and efficiencies across the company.
Looking for a visual communication platform as your company scales? Reach out anytime(opens in a new tab or window) to chat about Canva Teams!
