ALYKA selected to become Canva’s first official Agency Partner

ALYKA are proud to announce that we are the first agency to be selected as an official Canva Agency Partner.

We’d previously joined Canva in a product partnership, where we were able to demonstrate our command of the platform and our knack for helping clients get more out of it. This new Agency Partner program establishes a pipeline for the platform to refer clients to agencies like ALYKA that have trained Canva experts on staff who are equipped to onboard and train client teams.

Achieving this result was no easy feat - ALYKA’s design team have spent years gaining an in-depth understanding of the platform and researching how we can best serve Canva users. The team also underwent numerous rounds of testing, interviews and training with Canva before securing the partnership.

The challenge faced by marketing managers 

Back in 2022, we asked a group of over 60 marketing professionals what their biggest frustrations were. 

One of the most common answers was graphic design - they felt they had to wear too many ‘hats’ in their role and that creating professional design assets was simply a bridge too far. The usual reflex here is to outsource to a designer for every little piece of content, but this is neither time nor cost-efficient and often leads to brand inconsistencies. 

At the same time, our own marketing manager had identified that their process of asking our internal design team for ad-hoc design collateral was proving inefficient. 

This got us thinking about the areas where Canva users were struggling and how we could help lighten their load. 

Cue the unveiling of our Canva Brand Toolkit… 

The Canva Brand Toolkit 

Canva empowers non-designers to create professional-grade visual collateral, but that doesn’t mean organisations can start using it straight off the shelf. Onboarding is essential, especially if multiple team members are creating collateral without agreed-upon guidelines. 

Put simply, our Canva Brand Toolkit is a comprehensive package where we train your staff to use the platform effectively and provide a library of branded, ready-to-use Canva templates. 

To create your brand kit, we start by auditing your brand. This involves assessing your current brand assets and how your organisation uses them. We’ll then provide recommendations on how your team can use Canva to get the most out of these assets. 

Next, we build your brand kit. This resource clearly outlines your key brand assets, such as logos, colours and fonts, and allows you to customise permissions to ensure that only certain team members are able to edit these parameters. This drastically reduces the risk of brand inconsistencies across teams.

Our designers will also build a suite of templates in Canva that empower you and your team to quickly create new collateral without fear of committing a design faux pas or breaching your organisation’s brand guidelines.

Finally, we’ll onboard your team by training them to effectively use the brand kit, making sure your organisation gets the most out of your new design resource. 

Check out our recent case study to see how a Canva Brand Toolkit helped Advanteering’s team members create consistent, on-brand tender proposals. 

Why were we selected?

At ALYKA, we don’t just love Canva - we’ve also done the research to understand what Canva users are struggling with, what their pain points are, and where they need help. Because of this, we were ready to hit the ground running as Canva’s first Agency Partner. 

Our Canva Brand Tool Kit offering is the culmination of this hard work and reflects our commitment to empowering marketing managers to create branded collateral hassle-free.  

We’re also fortunate that our Head of Design and UX, Xixi Ma, is experienced in delivering design training to non-designers. In fact, her design workshops have become a must-attend for Perth’s marketing professionals! This makes her perfectly placed to onboard our clients and set them up for success.

What does the partnership mean?

As a Canva Agency Partner, ALYKA will now be working more closely with the platform to provide design solutions to clients across Australia, including: 

• Branded template design
• Design services 
• Onboarding services and folder set-up
• Training sessions

In doing so, we hope to equip marketing managers with the skills to efficiently develop design collateral. We also want to embolden them to be more independent in their content creation efforts and to be able to use the platform to its full potential.