Monica Silvestre is Global Head of Community at Canva. Over 185 million people use Canva every month. Operating this size poses a significant problem for building community programs that can scale globally but impact locally.
In this deeper dive, we discuss how they've evolved the structure of their team as they've matured. Along with templates for meetings and sharing project updates, how they share knowledge among the team, and we discuss the tools they use to manage it all.
The lessons Monica shares can help make sure you build your team and programs ready to scale.
Monica:
In 2021, when I wrote the first community strategy, we were trying to figure out how do we grow local content to best support the local communities across the world? And my solution that I put forward was, I've seen the magic that community can bring. And I think by hiring community managers, we can accomplish this. We can grow local content. We can start a creators program, invest heavily in the local communities. And thankfully, it was approved. So that's how we kickstarted our international growth.
“In many cases, the community managers were some of the first team members that were hired into a market.”
They were reporting into me directly on the central team for community. Over time, our markets have evolved. We've grown in markets, both in maturity, we've evolved as a product, we have new features. And to sort of compliment that complexity, if you will, like when you have more team members, when you have more marketing levers that you're pulling in a specific country, you need to shift into a different strategy.
So early days, community managers in country were reporting into me at the central level. But maybe this kind of gives you a nice overview of the org chart here. This is what it looks like today. So up at the top, you have the global community. This is our, what we call the center of excellence. We break it down into verticals. So the advocacy programs are vertical, education is a vertical, et cetera. Everything you see there is its own vertical. And we have a vertical lead that oversees that particular program. Then when you go to the layer below, these are the country community managers. And in the past, they would have directly reported into my team up top. But actually today, as our markets have evolved, as we have, I guess, matured in a sense in terms of our marketing plans across each country, the teams are now getting shifted into regional structures.
So I want to use Europe as the closest example. You have a European community lead, and he dots into me and my team up top. And he is the direct coach. We call them coaches at Canva. He is the direct manager, let's say, of the country community managers that you see below in those different markets.
One thing I've learned is you just have to be willing and open to adapt. The structure we had before made a lot of sense at the time when we didn't have so many other marketing team members in a country. But now that we do, you have to kind of continue to evolve as an organization and make sure the reporting lines properly support the team members that you have in market.
Monica:
The way that the central team operates, the purple, just visually thinking about it, the purple part up top, all those different verticals, is we're really the center of excellence. And at Canva, we call them specialties.
“So we are masters of the craft, if you will, the craft being community. And we're working to develop the community strategy company-wide that is empowered through toolkits, playbooks, things like that.”
We set the overall direction for community at Canva. We work on the strategy and how we're going to measure success and how we're going to go about executing, developing toolkits that can be scaled out across the business.
Now on the international CM front, that's where the implementation really occurs. So this has been a bit of an interesting shift, specifically with the regional community lead for Europe. What I've realized is it's so important to have that person plugged into what we're doing at the global side, on the global end, because the more integrated he is, the easier it makes his work in leading the implementation and market.
Monica:
This is something that we've developed that has helped us keep our community strategy implementation super sharp, which is this flywheel.
So community can mean a lot of things. You can nest so many different responsibilities under a community manager, but we developed this so that we could stay true to ourselves and what we're trying to achieve with community at Canva.
So just to break it down a little bit, the first piece is the awareness. We're always striving to empower new people to design with Canva, and that applies to each vertical, whether it's education or whether it's creators or non-for-profits. The goal is this, to help new people design with Canva and learn how to do so most effectively.
There are many different actions that can be taken by a community manager to drive this point. And so one example is that we might partner with a teacher organization to host a webinar to teachers who might be unfamiliar with Canva, right? And if we do this effectively, then it helps us bring people, these new people into our community groups. So this might be the Facebook group for teachers in Indonesia. And if we're constantly nurturing this community and those new members are gaining value from the peer support that they're receiving, we find that then it leads us to new advocates for Canva.
“It's really important for our local CMs to be able to identify who are the people that are most involved, that want to get even deeper involved, and how can we make them either a Canvassador or potentially the coveted expert for Canva.”
And when we do this effectively, we find that this flywheel spins into motion without us having to do too many different things.
We tried to get really concrete and specific about the actions that we need to take and what we were trying to drive. So for us, advocacy is a huge, huge piece of community.
This flywheel came into play after we did a reorg with the team. And we realized it was really important because one of the challenges or the pain points were that when a community manager goes under new management, it's easy to say, "In this market, we really need them to do X, Y, and Z. And then in that market, this is a bigger priority." So having this flywheel and a lot of other accompanying pieces help to stay true to the craft and say, "Okay, no, this is what community managers do at Canva. And this is what they should continue to do in the market."
Anytime you have a team member going under new leadership, it's important to just set the guardrails around the work that they do and how they are meant to work.
Monica:
Dentists. This is a very random example, but let's say dentists were incredibly important to the business and we just wanted to ensure that we were supporting dentists. And this becomes its own community. This flywheel would apply to dentists, right? Because you could partner with the dentistry organization to host a webinar and expose Canva to many new dentists and create a different community group specifically for that audience and the job that dentists have to do. And then certainly find some dentist Canvassadors that would help us expand Canva to other dentists.
“I kind of regret using such a funny example, but all of that to say that this flywheel really does work across whatever audience you put forward.”
The flywheel applies to any user group you give it, and that's the intention. And I can predict that we will continue to evolve our priority user groups that we're gonna be focusing on Canva. So while it's the teachers and creators today, I can see it scaling into other types as well.
Monica:
I'm sharing right now the community all hands. This is an example of the kind of template that we would use in our monthly community all hands. The 30 some odd people who are on this team, they would attend this meeting.
Every community manager delivers their country update. So this is an example template that we use on the international front. So what you'll see at the top is you have the community program A, B, C, right? So this would be community program A might be education, community program B, creators, and community program C, just to keep the theme going, dentists.
So you would, under each one of those, you would have the key metric that you're tracking and showing the progress. And then certainly some secondary metrics for each of these different programs. You might be focusing more on one program. Let's say like 60% of your time might be going towards program A, and then 20 on program B and 20 on program C. So it varies by market. It really depends on what's the priority for that market, given the overall marketing plan.
We always have these great highlights that people can shout out. This is because we have participation across the world on these calls. It's a great way for our community members, our community builders really to show best practices of what's happening in their markets.
We like to say at Canva is that we're a community of practice. So we almost treat our community team like its own community and one of the best ways to sort of foster best practices is by sharing these different things that are working across markets. So this is a great way for them to do that. They also highlight key opportunities, any action items and any risks.
So one thing that is helpful about this particular template, we use it in Canva and then you can highlight something, maybe that was interesting and make a comment, tag potentially my boss and say, look at how amazing this result was, which then triggers, it can trigger like a cascade of acknowledgement.
“Wow, that's amazing that person did that particular thing. What a great idea. And then tag another person, hey, why don't we bring this into the product for the next cycle? Seems like a great opportunity, something the community would love.”
So this simple template is a snapshot way to explain what's happening across each market on a monthly basis. And that works for the country community managers.
Then for the vertical leads, they do a very similar one, but each one has their own program, right? So this would be community education and same kind of structure. They also showcase like different progress that's being made across markets. So they're gonna have a higher level view and then the community managers can be a little more granular.
This type of template here is one that gets used when we wanna highlight a specific campaign or project, something that potentially took a few weeks of development that was launched, that there were learnings made. So explaining the what, explaining the why, and then the then what. So if the what and the why and the results were really great, we might wanna continue running this. So the then what might be, we wanna now build out a playbook for other community managers to follow across different countries. It would get shared across the marketing organization. And then sometimes if certain things might get traction, they can go beyond the marketing work as well.
How do we ensure that the local initiatives are surfaced up to our team at the global level? And this is one effective way that we do it through Monday. So we break out the different community programs and then the community managers can insert all of the different initiatives that they're gonna be running in their markets. And this gets shared, not just with our team on the central front, but also the local teams so that there's visibility and a lot of alignment across what are the community managers gonna be focused on for the upcoming month, quarter, and what are the programs that are gonna be getting the most support. So I think this has been a really effective tool for the team.
We have these templates that we use for the vertical update and then the CM questions. So we might have new launch for education and back to school campaign coming up. And this would be created by our vertical leads with some comments. And then it gives the community managers an opportunity to add in any questions that can be addressed either one-on-one through the stock or even in the pod calls.
So we have this concept called a weekly pod call and it's hosted by the vertical lead for education or for creators or online forums. We have a few different people that would host these pod calls. And it gives the local community managers an opportunity to get together and sort of like a coffee chat. It's generally not that structured, but the point is for them to get the latest updates on these particular programs and what's happening at the central level so that they can just stay. It's hard to gain context when you're so far away sometimes. And so these calls are really good to keep everyone growing in the same direction.
Monica:
We've started this thing called the Community Wisdom Exchange, which is when there's something really clever, interesting that takes place within the team.
This person, Gonzo's tactics to keep the wow factor in each community initiative. He developed these really cool inspiration cards. There's a series of these cards and on the back of it, it explains to you how you can do all these different things to ensure that your community event, whether online or offline is like really well, right? And so he went through the, in this particular wisdom exchange, he takes everybody through the, yeah, the why, the how, and then the how they can implement in their respective markets.
“We have a pretty robust, or we're building a pretty robust like wiki of learnings across our different communities that are getting logged.”
And certainly one thing that's so good about it is when you onboard a new community manager or a vertical lead, like you have this knowledge base to just plug into and understand context of all the work that's happened in a particular market. And yeah, it's a really nice way for the community team members to give back to each other and help continue that inspirational wheel.
Monica:
So this is just an example of what we would create. First is like indicating the level of priority that this particular communication is that we need to make to the community, the topic of it, when it's being published, which community it is specifically for, and then what's the channel that it needs to get published in and of course the language. So this would just be overview of, this is what needs to get shared out.
Our community manager there in let's say Spain or in Mexico would go in and make sure that they like what's actually been translated. More often than not, they would make adjustments to give it that human touch. And then this would be sent off.
But it's a really easy way for us to create these newsletters across many different languages, over 100, for the market that we wanna send it out to. And it's how our team actually works today.
When we do campaigns, we will create a toolkit. So just to take you through our all hands deck, we had the community labs, for example. These were community led events, led by our CMs in support of Canva Create, which was a huge event that we just hosted. And so this is part of the community all hands where our vertical lead for our advocacy programs takes everybody through, and he will partner up with the regional for Europe, for example, to make sure that this gets executed really well locally. So just shouting out what the goals are for the particular campaign, where we're gonna be hosting events. This is actually where we hosted the events. There was this landing page that, if you go to this landing page, you'll see all the different languages. So from Brazil to France to Japan, like that landing page has Portuguese, French, Japanese, and then just shouting out some next steps and reminders that the CMs need to take note of. And from there, we have a Slack channel, which is essentially the go to market plan. That's where we share the different toolkits.
I think that the toolkits that we share for the different campaigns are what's really useful for the community managers, because it essentially gives them all the branding, local assets that can be used, assets that are already created in Canva.
“We have different photography, imagery, illustrations, like it's all unique to the country. And that's also part of our commitment to making sure things are actually locally relevant, culturally relevant.”
And thanks to the Creators Program, a lot of times we can work with local creators to help us develop these things as well.
Monica:
This is, these are some of the different tools that we use, our tool stack across community. It's pretty straightforward. You don't have to dive too deep into it, but just to say that we've played around with a number of different tools to try to find the ideal stack for the different jobs that we're doing. And this is where we've landed. So these are the different apps that we use day in, day out.
We rely on Looker for our community dashboard, where we'll be measuring across different priority areas, different metrics, and different countries. And this gives us a really nice high level view of how things are pacing across different markets. So this dashboard was created by Sara Vilas, who's our operations lead. She is completely on the community team. She does a lot of the operationalizing of our work, including things like this Looker dashboard.
For things that require like a data scientist, we have a data team at Canva that it's a resource that we would borrow, and so would other teams. So they're not directly on the community team.
“I would say one of my personal learnings across this has been how important it is to have somebody to help you operationalize the big vision and the ideas.”
Because it's one thing to say, "We're gonna do this campaign." It might be a one-off, but like, how do you actually structure it in such a way where you have the things that are scalable, like the toolkits, the reporting, the feedback loops? So Sara is somebody on my team that knows how to take my ideas and the ideas of our vertical leads and translate them into a format where we can replicate them, given that they're, if they're of course successful.
“So ops, man, ops is where it's at. Community without ops, I think you're missing a really important facet.”
It's something that I don't think we could do it. I wouldn't do it again without having an operational sidekick to ensure that our work is perfectly tracked and super scalable and ready to take learnings from.
Our community managers have been really instrumental in helping us scale this program. And I believe that without this program, we wouldn't have the rich local content that helps to empower all these locals to be using Canva across the world. And I think it's really helped us establish and grow our global footprint and community has been essential in that. We often see the markets where we have community managers, you tend to have the highest density of growth and of usage and adoption. So it's really a winning recipe for us at Canva and it's a great way for us to give back to the local community as well and feel extremely integrated.
There you have it. That's how Monica, Sara, and team tackle community at scale at Canva. I hope that helps. ✌️
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