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Canva Maximizes Efficiency for Designers and Empowers College Students

At colleges and universities, Canva is giving users across campus access to advanced design features — helping to save time and money, power student success and enforce brand guidelines.

CDW Expert CDW Expert

When I tell people I work for Canva, I often get an enthusiastic response. “Oh!” the person might say. “I love Canva! My friend used Canva to make invitations.” 

“That’s great,” I sometimes reply. “But have you tried using it to centralize your brand management or run a campaign?” 

This sometimes triggers a quizzical look, but it typically opens up a good conversation about Canva, the platform. Canva is so accessible and user-friendly that people sometimes think of it primarily as a consumer-facing tool. 

But that ease of use is precisely why we’re also seeing such enthusiastic adoption at the enterprise level, as well as in sectors such as higher education. In fact, more than 150 universities have rolled out Canva licenses to all of their students.

Colleges and universities have practically infinite design needs, ranging from on-campus events and student clubs to fundraising pitch packages. Here are three ways we’re seeing schools benefit from deploying design capabilities across campus. 

Canva Saves Designers Time and Money

Historically, designers at colleges and universities have had a tough time keeping up with demand. Part of this is due to budget and staffing constraints. But also, the academic calendar means there will be high-demand stretches — such as at the start of a new semester — that would strain any organization. 

By using Canva to create reusable, branded templates, designers can offload much of their repetitive work. For example, let’s say that every sports team on campus designates an “Athlete of the Week,” with an accompanying PDF announcement, press release and social media posts for five different platforms. With Canva, the university’s communications team can design each of these assets once, and then sports information directors across campus can reuse them for years. 

Such time savings — and the resulting cost savings — aren’t hypothetical. The University of Portland reduced design turnaround times by 98% using Canva’s templates and features, and a university in Czechoslovakia cut more than 1,300 design hours after deploying Canva. 

Canva Empowers Students to Get the Job Done

Through Canva’s campus licensing, universities with a qualifying number of faculty and staff licenses can turn on premium access for students at no additional charge. Across the top 100 universities in the United States, we’re seeing more than 40% of students using Canva to design projects for their classes, student life and personal projects. 

This brings a level of professionalism to their coursework and prepares nondesign students for a work world where presentation counts. Many also use Canva to create promotional materials for student clubs or to design their resumes or portfolios. 

Often, students are already familiar with Canva, making it one of the few solutions (along with tools such as word processing software and email) that follow them from K–12 to higher education to the workforce

Universities Can Easily Enforce Brand Guidelines With Canva

Does #B7A57A mean anything to you? Probably not. But I guarantee that a graphic designer at the University of Washington would instantly recognize it as the hex code for Husky Gold. Confuse this with #FFCD00 (the deep yellow gold worn by University of Iowa Hawkeyes) or #CEB888 (Purdue Boilermakers) or #B3A369 (Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets), and you’ll have a branding nightmare on your hands. 

Approval processes can create content bottlenecks, but traditionally they have been necessary to avoid press releases set in Comic Sans, or Instagram posts with photos that look like they were taken by a 2-megapixel digital camera from 2005. Instead of tracking down brand disasters after the fact, universities can use Canva to prevent them, while giving every department on campus the ability to create the content they need, when they need it.