What Is Canva & How Can You Use It To Promote Your Club?

Before I started working at Member Jungle, I had no idea what Canva was; since starting here, however, I have come to use Canva daily. My love affair with Canva hasn’t just been limited to the office. I’ve made a personal account and have used Canva for everything from helping friends with YouTube thumbnails to uni assignments and presentations to this movie poster for a fictional movie. 

 

 

I will not be taking any questions at this time. 

My point is that Canva is a super powerful and free tool that you should definitely use for your club. 

We decided to talk to you about this today because we have just created a range of Canva templates you can use when onboarding with Member Jungle. This will make it easier for you to announce the change to your members, help them log in to your site, download the app and keep them across changes being made. 

So, today, we are going to be covering the following things: 

• What is Canva
• How to use Canva
• What Canva templates is Member Jungle providing 
• How to keep using Canva to help your club

Before we start, it’s worth noting that this isn’t a paid deal or sponsorship thing with Canva. We just genuinely love their product, and we’ll never miss the chance to shout out a fellow Australian-made company. 

What Is Canva?

Canva describes itself as “a free-to-use online graphic design tool. Use it to create social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos and more.”

Basically, Canva allows you to easily create stunning images for your club. With their easy-to-use and beautiful templates, you can quickly make a great image. Canva also offers presets for website banners, YouTube thumbnails, social media posts, documents, and presentations. Plus, they have a massive range of stock photos for you to use in your designs.

Canva does have a free version and a paid version. At Member Jungle, we use the paid version. My personal account that I use for uni stuff is a free account. I can tell you for a fact that the free version of Canva is awesome, and you can do a lot with it. When using the free version, I rarely find myself missing the premium features. 

That being said, the premium version is excellent, and if I were to use my personal account every day, I would fork out the extra cash for the premium version. The premium version gives you access to Canva’s branding kit, which allows you to save brand colours and logos. Additionally, you can take advantage of fantastic photo editing features such as an automatic background remover, saving you the expense of purchasing expensive image editing software.

How To Use Canva

The way Canva works is you either start a new blank design or choose what you will be creating from a list of potential options. 

These options include everything you could ever need for your club. For this example, we will choose social media. 

 

 

From there, Canva will take us to a page asking what social media post we want to create. Then, we have to select what we want to make, in this case, an Instagram post, and then this page will come up. 

 

 

Here, we have a blank canvas automatically formatted to the correct size and ratio for Instagram. On the left of the page is a series of templates we can use to make the perfect post. There is also a column to the left of the templates where we can add new elements and text, upload images, and more. 

Instead of choosing one of these templates, let’s search for one that would be good for a rock climbing club by searching “rock climbing” in the search bar at the top. 

 

 

Here, we have a massive list of Instagram post templates for rock climbing. Now, we need to scroll down the list until we find one we like, and then we can select it. 

 

 

Once we have selected the template we want, it moves across to the previously blank post. From here, we can start customising the post by selecting different parts and changing them to suit our rock climbing club better. After about two minutes, we have our final result. 

 

 

This post can now be exported from Canva and will be ready to post on the club’s Instagram page.  

Canva makes making great-looking images and videos for your club super easy. Plus, they give you the choice to build a post from scratch if you want to or tweak a beautiful template if that’s easier for you. I know it’s easier for me. 

If you want more information on how to use Canva, look at this great article from them: How to Use Canva: A Beginner’s Guide. 

What Canva Templates Is Member Jungle Providing 

When your club joins Member Jungle, you will receive a “Prepare to Launch” email that includes links to several Canva templates. These templates will help you announce your plans to implement Member Jungle to your members. 

The Member Jungle templates that are available include: 

• A Facebook post about moving to Member Jungle  
• An Instagram post about moving to Member Jungle
• Various promotions for the mobile app 
  • Printable posters 
  • Banners for your website

 

The promotions for the app also have QR codes attached, so you could even print these QR codes out and post them up at your next event to encourage members to download the app. 

These templates will be fully customisable to suit your club’s colours, theme and style. To customise these templates, you just need to click on the button on the email that says “Personalise this Post”. This will open a second page that will look like this. 

 

 

Now, all you need to do is click the “Use Template” button, which will open in Canva. If you don’t have a Canva account, you will need to create one here. The free version will be more than enough to edit this template. In Canva, you can edit every part of the template to make it suit your club. Here are just two quick edits I made to this template. 

 

 

You can make as many changes as you’d like to the template; you could delete all the images, fonts, wording, or whatever you need to do to make it work for your club. Of course, you don’t need to change anything; you can always export and post the templates exactly as they are. 

How To Keep Using Canva To Help Your Club 

Once you’ve downloaded your new templates, edited them, and posted them, you’ll be left with a Canva account, so why not put it to good use? From now on, you could use Canva to make all your social media posts, to help put together your next event posters, or even use it for your next presentation to your committee. I’ve used Canva’s slides to make a presentation for uni, which is excellent; I won’t be returning to PowerPoint anytime soon. 

If you’re looking for a great place to start, why not look at Canva’s Tutorial Page.

What Else Do You Need To Do? 

The good news is that you are at the pointy end of onboarding now. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to get your hands on a shiny new membership management system. You’ll be back to enjoying your club properly before you know it.  

In the meantime, why not read The Tech Side Of Onboarding With Member Jungle or Everything You Need To Know About Onboarding At Member Jungle.