Canva can’t be contained. Since launching the inaugural Canva World Tour on Oct. 1, the whimsical brand has been bursting into conferences, community hubs, brand campuses and local streets around the globe on a mission to accomplish 1 million trainings in the month of October, and nurture its robust community of users.
From a mobile learning unit dubbed the Brandwagon, to more than 250 workshops and seminars hosted worldwide, to the relaunch of its “online-first” Design School platform, to a grand finale event that will feature the biggest product drop in brand history, Canva World Tour is designed to reach users anywhere and everywhere. The program marks a sea change in how Canva is approaching in-person engagement. From 2022 to 2024, the brand’s flagship event, Canva Create, took place in a single location. The new tour format was built to reflect one of the brand’s core value propositions: accessibility.
“No matter if you could attend a Brandwagon stop or if you could get to one of the Canva hubs, you still felt like you were participating in some way, and are a part of this movement,” says Jimmy Knowles, head of experiential at Canva. “And that was really important for us from the start.”
We sat down with Knowles for a deep dive into the strategy behind what he calls Canva’s “most ambitious marketing initiative to date.” Here’s the scoop. (Agencies: Public School, strategy, design, creative; Czarnowski and Lime Media, logistics, production, fabrication)
ALL HANDS ON DECK
Considering the scale and scope of Canva World Tour, the event team had to rally the troops. The program required an enormous cross-departmental effort, particularly considering the speed at which it had to be planned and executed.
“It is a massively cross-functional initiative,” Knowles says. “It pulls on every single team all across the business to pull something like this off in such a short amount of time. We sat in our makeshift meeting room at the Canva Creative Cabana at Cannes in June and kind of put the stamp of approval on moving forward with the Canva World Tour. So this all has come together in three, four months—really quickly.”
A ROLLING CREATIVE LAB
The Canva Brandwagon is a mobile studio and community gathering space that will ultimately make 16 stops across the U.S., including the State Fair of Texas, Advertising Week, The Grove in Los Angeles, and a variety of K-12 schools, college campuses and community hubs.
“We wanted Canva World Tour to feel like we were meeting the community where they are, and really going to them, getting them hands-on with the product and getting creators hands-on with the tool,” Knowles says.
Inside (and around) the rainbow-hued vehicle, attendees can engage in everything from interactive workshops with brand experts, to a design-tools-themed Canva Suite Treats candy shop, to a social media studio, to learn-and-play stations, to a crowdsourced vision board that prompts them to answer a philosophical question.
“We have this really incredible activation at the Brandwagon where the question is: What is one goal that you would like to see the world achieve in your lifetime,” he says. “Understanding that sentiment of not just what people are wishing for, but how Canva plays a role in them accomplishing that goal, or contributing to it in some way, has been really profound and meaningful.”
CAMPUS TAKEOVERS
In addition to a host of local meetups and educational community events, Canva World Tour encompasses full-fledged takeovers of the brand’s campuses worldwide. For the month of October, Canva hubs in London; Sydney, Australia; Melbourne, Australia; Manila, Philippines; Prague, Czech Republic; and Vienna, Austria, have become collaborative, always-on learning centers where users of all stripes can partake in training and workshops.
“We’re hosting our own sessions to get individuals hands-on with the tools and to speak to different communities and audiences, whether that’s small businesses, entrepreneurs, students or teachers,” Knowles says. “And the response has been so overwhelming.”
GLOBAL CONSISTENCY, LOCAL RELEVANCE
When it comes to large-scale global event programs, Canva leverages a “global consistency, local relevance” mentality to ensure that the campaign at large has a cohesive look, message and curriculum, but also includes touchpoints that add some local flavor based on the locale. In London, for instance, the brand hosted a Tea and Tech event.
“We like to write the playbook centrally and allow for this sense of global consistency and local relevance when we’re activating. So we’ve put different structures in place, and we’ve really left it up to the local teams to program out the hubs, in particular, to talk about our international presence in a way that is going to speak to the local community,” says Knowles.
NEXT-LEVEL DIGITAL LEARNING
Keeping with the accessibility theme, Canva is offering a wide range of digital learning options. The anchor of the brand’s virtual education strategy is its relaunched online Design School platform, which features several new courses, options for accreditation, and gamified features, like earnable badges.
“Throughout the course of October and certainly beyond, our hope is that folks will leverage Design School to continue upskilling, to continue to further their education, to continue getting trained in the different tools and products in Canva,” says Knowles. “And this is all complemented by hosted webinars, different challenges and community events that we throw locally, both IRL and digitally.”
PARTNERSHIPS & NETWORKING
Canva is partnering with a range of companies for a multitude of purposes to bring the tour to life. In addition to official event sponsors like LinkedIn, AWS and Meta, the brand is working with companies and properties to host more intimate events all month.
Consider Advertising Week in New York, where Canva partnered with Business Insider on a Supper Club event that reimagined the traditional approach to networking dinners. Among highlights was the Spaghetti Oracle experience, during which attendees donned lab coats and literally tossed spaghetti at a wall, after which the “oracle” offered them insights on their creative energy. There was also 360-degree projection-mapping that fully transformed the venue’s dining space, and an illusionist that kept attendees entertained and informed as they ate.
A SHOWSTOPPING FINALE
Knowles says Canva’s World Tour finale event will have a decidedly different vibe from its annual conference, explaining that he “wanted to make sure that whatever we did here with this second big drum beat in the year for us felt like a different experience from Canva Create.”
But that doesn’t mean the affair won’t have that signature Canva panache—the brand has never been afraid to incorporate bold theatrics into its stage presentations. And during the Oct. 30 event, which will be held at its Sydney-based headquarters, the company is pulling out all of the stops. Take the livestreamed keynote, its “most ambitious to date,” which is slated to include some of the most significant and advanced product launches in brand history. It will also, of course, serve as a celebration of the creativity unleashed and community connections forged throughout the tour.
“I’m looking forward to this finale event being this gigantic crescendo,” Knowles says. “We’ve had 30 days on the road. We are meeting the community all across the globe. We’re hearing these incredible stories. We’re hearing about how they use the product. We’re hearing about their wishes for the future of the product. And you will see that all come together with a beautiful, sparkly, multicolor rainbow bow at the end of the month with the finale event.”
MEASURING IMPACT
Analyzing the overall impact of the multilayered tour will require tapping into a range of metrics. In addition to the core objective of training 1 million people on Canva in a month, the brand will consider what Knowles calls the “art and science” of measurement—both the hard numbers and the softer KPIs. Noting that there are “many different levers to pull to demonstrate success,” he says the brand will have plenty of data to inform future iterations of Canva World Tour.
“We found a really great formula where we’re taking both sides of the art and the science,” he says. “You’ve got the numbers that fit squeaky-clean into a spreadsheet where we’re looking at the marketing qualified leads that we’re getting, we’re looking at the folks who are stopping by the Brandwagon from different enterprises of different scales and levels, and how we’re getting that into our sales pipeline… But also trying to measure through social sentiment, what the emotional connection is that folks who attend something at the Brandwagon feel for Canva, and we get that, certainly, through on-the-ground interactions and through anecdotes that we’re getting.”
LESSONS LEARNED
Launching the first iteration of a campaign inevitably means there are lessons to be learned and tweaks to be implemented. Such is the case with Canva World Tour. After the Brandwagon’s first few stops, the team observed and collected feedback on a variety of elements, like how attendees prefer to absorb information and which audiences require a more high-touch approach. And the fine-tuning has continued throughout the month.
“They want the humanity behind the training,” Knowles says. “And some people learn differently, and that’s what we’ve learned a lot through this tour, is how we can cater, how we provide these learning materials and these lessons and these hands-on workshops to the community in a way that’s going to resonate with them, to make them feel like they’re taking something meaningful and tangible away from it. So we’re trying to do a little bit of that adjusting as we go.”
USHERING IN A NEW ERA
According to Knowles, the tour’s finale celebration will help usher in a “brand new era for Canva” that may also signal a paradigm shift for the experiential marketing industry at large.
“As AI becomes more prevalent in our day to day, as it creeps its way into every aspect of our life, from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed, that need for human connection is going to be more important than ever. And I don’t think there’s any tool in the marketing mix more powerful than brand experience to be able to deliver on that for consumers,” says Knowles. “At the end of the day, humanity is at the heart of Canva. Our community is the most important thing that makes our product grow, that makes Canva who we are, and making sure that our marketing is reflective of that same humanity is incredibly important.”
Photos: Courtesy of Canva
