This is a guest blog by Lidia Varesco.
Lidia Varesco Racoma of Lidia Varesco Design in Chicago empowers nonprofits to make a change through strategic branding and marketing design. With over two decades of experience, Lidia is known not only for her ability to express a client’s mission but also for her friendly, approachable working style. She is a blogger and speaker and leads branding and creative marketing workshops for nonprofits and small businesses worldwide.
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Branding is crucial for nonprofits to effectively communicate their mission and build trust with their audience. However, creating the multitude of graphics that are needed for social media, email marketing, and content marketing can be challenging and time-consuming.
Many organizations are already using Canva to create graphics in their organization. Developing a comprehensive Canva Brand Kit can help streamline the design process, ensuring consistent and engaging visuals.
What is the Canva Brand Kit?
The Canva Brand Kit centralizes an organization’s brand assets, including fonts, logos, colors, icons, imagery, graphics, brand voice, and templates right in the Canva editor. You can even save a copy of your brand guide.
This simplifies the design process, ensuring that all materials created are consistent with the organization’s branding guidelines.
The Brand Kit includes the following:
Logos: All variations of your logo should be stored here.
Colors: Brand color specifications are assigned here.
Fonts: Font styles can be assigned here.
Brand Voice: By adding your brand voice, Canva’s online AI text generator, Magic Write, will suggest copy written in your voice.
Photos: Brand photos that are often used should be stored here.
Graphics: This is a handy place to store your brand guide for easy reference.
Icons: Icons that are used frequently can be kept here.
|Color makes up about 80% of brand recognition.
Why you should use the Brand Kit
Consistency
Maintaining a consistent graphic look and feel is essential for building a strong, recognizable brand. Storing all brand assets in one central location eliminates the risk of using outdated or incorrect branding elements, ensuring all graphics align with brand guidelines. No more using the wrong logo or color specs!
Efficiency
The Canva Brand Kit significantly speeds up the graphic creation process—and makes it less intimidating. Team members can quickly access and utilize approved brand templates, eliminating the need to start from scratch each time. This saves time and minimizes the need for multiple rounds of revisions, as the correct brand elements are used from the start.
Collaboration
Facilitating better teamwork is another benefit of the Brand Kit. As multiple users can access and contribute to the Brand Kit, your team can collaborate more effectively. The shared access ensures that everyone is on the same page (literally!) and can easily incorporate the latest brand elements into their designs.
Professionalism
Using the Brand Kit helps elevate the professionalism of your nonprofit’s visuals. By consistently using brand assets and templates, your graphics will look more recognizable and refined. This not only enhances your organization’s image but also aligns with your mission and goals.
How to use the Brand Kit
After you load brand assets into your Brand Kit, you can easily access them from the sidebar (under Brand) when creating graphics such as social media posts, email headers, and blog headers.
Simply drag and drop your brand elements into your designs. Or select from the prepopulated brand colors and fonts.
Additionally, you can create and share branded templates for often-used graphics, allowing for a fast and efficient design process. This is especially useful for social media and email marketing, where a myriad of graphics are needed.
With the Canva Brand Kit—and all of your brand assets in one place—staying on-brand with your graphics is almost foolproof.
A Canva Pro account is recommended to access full Brand Kit features. Eligible nonprofits can receive Canva Pro for free. Learn more.
Recommended Training:
Nonprofit communications and marketing professionals often balance multiple responsibilities, including creating Canva designs on the fly. In this fast-paced session, you will learn how to create more effective Canva graphics by utilizing key design principles. We’ll cover layout, color, typography, and imagery, helping you create effective and engaging digital designs. Best practices for staying on-brand will also be discussed. Prior Canva experience is not required, though familiarity is helpful. Resources will be provided.