บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ #11: Canva for Business: Better Content, Smarter Design & Practical AI Tools

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: So I'm saying this about Canva. Okay. And I didn't plan that segway. But the thing is, right. The Canva thing, right. It's made graphic design democratic. A, because it was free to load up in the beginning and it still is. You can still use it for free. So it wasn't complicated. Like you didn't need a degree in graphic design to find your way through. It came with its own lessons. It's a drag and drop model. So anyone who was already using something like MailChimp, for example, could transition very easily into Canva, which came in a bit later. And so for someone who is from the punters perspective, and this is a punter who works with making things every day, that's my job, right? It just unleashed my career. In a lot of ways, my career grew alongside Canva because I started with the basic stuff. It allowed me to do simple things for clients. without having to send a brief to the graphic designer in the agency. I worked in an agency space from day one. So it's like now I could actually make the stuff for the clients right away. And of course, as it grew, you were able to do more and more things with it. I actually learned graphic design through Canva. So you don't need to be a graphic designer. didn't need get graphic design course. Now I do respect graphic designers. I have to say this because they are great for developing your brand. They're great for illustrative stuff or something really unique. Say they give you a design Canva is so good at allowing you to take it and running with it and go further with it. So the user experience, the accessibility, the game changing template library, there's no longer a blank page you have to look at. And the other Sinéad Walsh: Right. Elish Bul-Godley: thing is it's coming at graphic design. from the functional perspective. it comes in with what do you need to do? And it's got all of those things laid out for you. Whereas if you're looking at something like a legacy suite, like Adobe, it's coming at you with all the sexy tools and the illustration, but it's not as focused on what does a small business actually need to create? So it kicks off from, here's all the things you need to create. Now you can play with them. So that's my take on Canva. Sinéad Walsh: to thank you so much. And yes, I do completely agree with what you said, both in terms of democratising graphic design, but also what graphic designers still very much offer in this day and age, for businesses. So, Debbie, I'm gonna kick the same question to you. Why do you think that Canva is so popular and widely adopted? Debbie Ringwood: Okay, well Canva mission is to empower the world to design, and it definitely allows for that. In every single session, without exception, there's like that moment when people realise, I can do all this myself. And you always see it happen. You see the change in reaction from like I'm maybe a little bit worried about technology to okay, maybe I can make my own website or I now can do my own social media graphics. So with every single session, without exception, and I've trained a lot of people at this point, I always see that that change where they they suddenly realize that they have control their own business. And in some cases, they're not going to ever want to do it themselves, but they're going to understand what needs to be done. So I would have people who are using it for a while but are afraid to touch a new button and see what happens. I'm very much somebody who loves shiny new objects. I have subscriptions to all sorts of things. So when I see something new on Canva, I just press the button straight away to see what happens. And I'm all about encouraging people to do that and enjoy what they're doing and be proud of what they create as well. There's 260 million users on an on a monthly basis, active monthly users, which is a phenomenal number. I'm using it since twenty thirteen when they were in their first million, and with four hundred and thirty thousand users in Ireland alone. So it is absolutely amazing to see people take it on. And it's everybody from startups and solopreneurs to organizations trading internationally. There's some huge brands that work with Canva, use different features. It is absolutely fantastic, and it's my favorite tool, and I've been using it like 13 years at this point. I am an exceptionally heavy user of Canva and I now have two Canva accounts two because I ran out of my AI allowance, but literally anything you can think of creating, you can do it in there. So whether it's your graphics or your captions or your marketing strategy or a planning day, there's tools there for absolutely everything. And on top of that, what I love is that it actually works really well with other tools that we're probably already using in business. So your Dropbox or Google Drive or your Mailchimp, as Elish mentioned, all those kind of systems, they all plug into Canva as well. So you don't have to remember loads of different passwords and keep downloading everything to your desktop because you can actually get them all to work together. So it's a tool that can transform a business. And I literally know that it's transformed mine because I teach so many people to use it. But before I was teaching people, it was it was that moment where I don't have to pay somebody else to go and do this for me. I can pay for an annual subscription or use the free one, but from now I can control where everything goes. I don't have to explain why I want my logo in the top corner or why I want this colour when it's not really my brand colour. I actually had control over all that and that's hugely important when you're in business. So that's why I think it's so popular. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And when I'm talking to people, obviously Canva features in a lot of lessons that we would teach anyway, like AI for social media creation But the line I always use is I rob a living off Canva, and that's the

truth, because it doesn't matter if it's client work, content plan work, stuff for stand up comedy, it's incredible, right? What it's been able to do and you know, even things like when you're doing Edinburgh Fringe, the amount you put into Elish Bul-Godley: you Sinéad Walsh: posters, flyers, all that thing, even having some level of control over that. Or like we were saying, like if you have a graphic designer, do the main thing and you can control the assets, you're dead right. It's an absolute game changer. So on that note, and I'll start with you, Debbie, what is the biggest mistake you often see people making with Canva? Debbie Ringwood: Trying to do too much. Anyone who's ever been in a class of me will hear me say less is more all the time. People get excited because there's so many different things that they can do, and they try to either take on too many features at the same time, particularly if they're just beginning, or they try and cram everything they want to do into a particular piece of content. So calm it down a little bit and do kind of one or two features, be clear on the message. But don't just do video because somebody told you to do it. Know why you're doing video. So when you start off using Canva, most people I find are there because they are using templates and it's a great way to do a graphic for, you know, a special occasion. And after that, they sometimes they're a little bit slower to move along, but sometimes they just say, my God, now I'm going to start using sheets and I'm going to press into code and I'm going to try everything. Just take it one step at a time. If you try and do too much, you get overwhelmed and you'll have a whole load of projects that you've started. And you haven't completed because you haven't got time to go back and do them all, or you've forgotten, or you've got bored and moved on to something else. So just take it one step at a time and don't be afraid of new features. Because sometimes new features will appear on your dashboard and there might be a nice button there to press. Try it and see what happens. If you don't like something, you can always hit delete. Even if you post it to social media and you don't like it, you can still hit delete. But we're only going to get better through practice. So don't be afraid of anything, but at the same time, please don't try and do everything at the same time. Just take away a little bit, work on that. When you're comfortable, move on to something else. Because when you try and say, look, okay, I've got a new business and or I've got a small business, and I'm gonna try and do email, I'm gonna do a website, I'm gonna do my social media graphics, I'm gonna do presentation decks, I'll have sales proposals, I'll have training plans. It's great you can do all these things because I could list forever all the things that you can create in Canva, but nobody can do them all. No matter how experienced you are, you can't do them all at the same time. So it's like everything else. Try and avoid the overwhelm. Don't just do it because somebody told you you need to do it. Do it when you're good and ready, but use the features that are appropriate for you initially. It's a learning curve for every single one of us. I'm using it 13 years and I still learn new features every week. So that would be my my tip Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, yeah, that I think that's great advice. Debbie Ringwood: for that one. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, absolutely brilliant advice. And an old boss of mine in Primark, Suzanne, used to say, We're not gonna boil the ocean today. And I think that's a great a great way of putting it because exactly that if you try and bite off more than you can chew, especially with a tool like Canva, the fear sets in, you know, half assed designs are here, there and everywhere. And yeah, you're exactly right. So beautiful answer, Debbie. Elish. to kick it to you from your perspective, what are the biggest mistakes you see people making with Canva? Elish Bul-Godley: So I'll come at it from the perspective of someone who's been a brand manager, right? And branding is what I do. So you've got two ends of the spectrum, right? Making something with a blank page, right? And on the other end of the spectrum, you've got the AI making it from a single sentence, right? Canva sits somewhere nicely in between there, right? So the beauty about Canva, which I talked about earlier on, was that they have great templates that you can just pluck and... use, Straight away. So you're not having to design too much. The problem is a lot of people take those templates, but they don't tailor them and make them closer to their brand. So they don't take the templates they're given and tweak them so that it doesn't look like the same template that somebody else used on their Instagram the other day. Right? So you can avoid being AI slob by being unique, but at the same time, if you're using the same templates without changing them and your branding is inconsistent, you take one template today, another template tomorrow, but you don't put your colors You don't put your logos in both of them. They're going to look completely different on your Instagram feed, for example, that sort of thing. And that's why we're going to maybe later on, we'll demo how you can just tweak little things and use your brand. Hierarchy and graphic design. And this is the thing that just because you get a template doesn't mean you shouldn't be focused on very simple principles of graphic design, visual hierarchy, meaning the most important thing should be the biggest thing. The use of negative space, leaving a little space. little bit of space between things. You've all seen those AI slop flyers, right? Where everything's really packed in and there's tiny little icons. You don't want to do that either. So you want, the best posters you've ever seen are the ones that just make you stop in your tracks, right? And you need a lot of negative space for that. So, okay. So

making sure that you're staying close to graphic design, even though the templates are there and then making sure you're accessible. What you're putting out there is more accessible for people to see. Don't just, think about like, People who are colorblind, for example. And my Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: biggest bugbear, seriously my biggest bugbear is, and I'm gonna show it to you later, is how the fonts just blend in with their backgrounds. I'm like, so if you're trying to stop someone on the scroll, if you're trying to get somebody to persuade them with your graphic and they can't see your words when they're walking by really fast or they're scrolling by really fast. That lack of contrast could be really problematic. It's the stupidest, simplest little thing to get right. And yet I find that that's the biggest thing that could make the difference in the scroll. So also not organizing yourself. So I'm a bit of a type A person when it comes to my desk being tidy. I don't know about you Sinead, but my husband hates me for that, Sinéad Walsh: What do you think now? What do you think? You know me long enough now. Elish Bul-Godley: right? I come down to the kitchen and I put everything away because it does my head in, there's knives everywhere. So I'm the same with work, right? So you're organized all your materials into folders. I'm going to show you where those are. And just, it saves you time. If you're a small business, right? You want to save time. So get everything, put all the forks in the drawer, you know, all those things. Make sure everything's in the right place so that the next time you come and do the next job, everything's where you need it. And you can like flip over very quickly and resize something. So that's my take. Be unique. Make sure your brand is at the front of everything. Make sure you make it easy for people to see things, accessibility, and definitely organize what you have there in your Canva dashboard. Sinéad Walsh: Absolutely. I think it's fantastic advice. I think, like, you know, as we said, Canva absolutely makes design accessible, and it's incredible to see so many independent businesses Elish Bul-Godley: Yes. Sinéad Walsh: use Canva to get the most out of it. But yes, I couldn't agree with you more. the thinking behind the design and the design rationale still matters so so much. Absolutely. I I was actually, I think I told you guys before I was walking, it was like the first month I was living in Glasgow last year. And I was walking down one of the streets and there was a bus shelter ad. remember those things? And Elish Bul-Godley: yes. Sinéad Walsh: I was walking, I was walking down and I stopped and I was like, that's a Canva template. I know that's a Canva template. I've seen that template before. So imagine doing Elish Bul-Godley: Yes, yes, yes, I know. Sinéad Walsh: like a national large print scale, you know, advertising campaign. Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah, so awkward. Sinéad Walsh: And it anyway, anyway. So I just want to focus on. I suppose that nugget. So, what does make good design and content within Canva? Okay. So we were talking about tweaking things and making it unique and and that kind of thing. But I would like to talk about the things that, yeah, make something look quite attractive, stop people either in their step or in their scroll, and just get them to engage visually and mentally with the piece in front of us. So How do you think Canva has changed how businesses approach content creation? Elish Bul-Godley: Well, as a content strategist, Canva comes in with a lot of options that remind you of the different types of mediums or the different types of content that you really could be making. It's not just your Instagram posts all day long. So I think from a game changer is what we're talking about here, is where the Canva brings you a range of things. It starts with social perhaps, but it shows you that you can do an ebook, you can create a document, you can create a poster, can create a flyer. So across your marketing mix, Canva allows a small business to take control over all the different things and reminds them that there's collateral, the sales collateral that they have to pay attention to. It's not just the flyer, it's not just the social. There's can do other things. can make, digital lead generators like audio books, or you can create web banners. You can focus on your email marketing. There's an email thing there. So like, I, what I think it's a game changer is if somebody needed an all you can eat thing, the all you can eat tool, I think it's actually, it's working towards that from my perspective. And it's allowing Sinéad Walsh: Love time. Elish Bul-Godley: you. to, and it's in a way there's built in processes there that force you to do the right thing. Sometimes I think Debbie will speak Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: to that. So that's my personal take as a content strategist. It's always coming into you with templates that already have a couple of things locked in, like, you know, hierarchy, layouts are great because other graphic designers put in, it gives you access to lot of stock imagery and so on. So it's like, it's a cost saver. you know, It's changed the game again, right? It's opened up like stock video, B-roll for videos, for example, it's opened up audio files and music files. So I just think, you know, Canva has opened up a small business perspective on the amount of content that they really should be thinking about and freeing them to express themselves a lot. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, I love that. Absolutely love that. And Debbie, if I may ask you, as our our resident expert, to you, what makes a design effective and unique rather than just attractive? Debbie Ringwood: It's got to think about the audience first. And sometimes people get into, you know, this particular type of content is trending, or I did a course and they told me to do more video. It's always about the audience. It's not about what

you like. It's not about where you want to spend time. And that's, you know, something across social media anyway. But it doesn't have to be complicated. Sometimes I like a very simple graphic and it might just have a tiny little flicker of animation at the bottom. Enough to draw the eye, but not enough to make it into a full blown video. But it just is enough to stop the scroll. And we now have the opportunity to create loads of different types of content. And, you know, for some of us it's great. We have amazing products that we can put up on our socials, but a lot of us struggle as well with the type of business that we're in. So if I'm an accountant or a solicitor or even a marketer, you can't necessarily share your client details. Look, here's an example of the accounts that I did this week. So this is a place for you to have lots of backup content and There even if you want to go on camera yourself, there's tools there to make it easier for you as well. There's captions in there, you can have them branded, you can work with templates. There's a lot of different options in there. we can have great designs without having to overthink everything. And that's what I love about Canva. It has simplified it for everybody. And some people have a natural interest in it, they've a flair for design and they can see things work really brilliantly. But there's guides within it to try and ensure that we can line things up properly, that something is centered or it's not too close to the border. So there's lots of different ways to try and teach us. And there is a design school within Canva as well, which is worth a mention. If you need a little bit of extra guidance on something like putting a video together, if you go to the bottom left hand corner of your homepage, there's actually three dots. And whenever you see three dots, that means there's something else going on in here. There's a whole design school in there where you can do 10 minutes on video marketing. 10 minutes on social media or go further than that. So to get a great design, you have all of the tools available to you there. And if you aren't comfortable at any point, there's AI prompts throughout the system to try and help you. So the little ask can Sinéad Walsh: Okay. Debbie Ringwood: the button is there to try and say, okay, but you're not really sure about that. Could I make this better? And it'll go in and help you with all of that. So I would say simple designs, audience first, and be clear on the message. Don't try and cram everything into one into one graphic. It might be multiple graphics into a carousel post or it might even be multiple posts. But use all the tools that are there to help you to make sure that you're clear on what it is you're trying to say. Sinéad Walsh: Okay. Okay. I think that's great advice. Thank you so much. And then Elish, just to kick back to you, right? Because we're talking about marketing and branding and branding strategy and that kind of thing. How can

a small business, right? Especially if you are a solopreneur and you're wearing a million hats on an hourly basis, how can a small business go about maintaining consistent branding and sticking with their own guidelines? Because we know what we're like, right? So what kind of principles would you urge people to employ to make make sure that that branding is consistent throughout. Elish Bul-Godley: Okay, so the first thing I always say in the strategies course is, and we're coming at it from strategy, strategy is who, what, why, when, where, how, right? That's basically it. And the who is know thyself, right? And know who you're talking to, right? So where we start bringing branding into the conversation at the very beginning of strategies, know who you are. Nobody can do this for you, right? So like, Canva can't do this for you? Your classmates can't do this for you, your lecture can't do this for you. You have to figure this out first and you have to lock it down, write it down. And you actually have to be expressing yourself, right? And noting down what it is that you like, what colors stand for you, whatever. Say you've created a logo and you know it represents you. Lock that in and make sure that you iterate from that logo or you iterate from, say you wrote something and you say, that's my voice, right? Lock it down. What are we doing? We're creating a playbook, a guideline, a style guide. So when we do that, we start doing that process. Now, when we move to a tool to Canva, we are faced with this wonderful tool called the Brand Kit. Now, the Brand Kit is there waiting for you to put your voice into it, waiting for you to pick the colors that you want. And once you've done that, then you don't have to worry about it anymore. You can just say, switch on the Brand Kit. Those are the colors I'm going to pick. I don't have to remember which color. I don't have to eyeball the colors anymore. I don't have to remember the hex codes, that six digit code. I just have that locked in now, right? So if you do that first, right, you are then now opening up the possibility of just saving a lot more time, being more consistent by using your brand kit. But here's the thing. That brand kit cannot exist like all of the cosmos by itself, right? You have to physically choose those colors first. and you have to stick to them. So A, know yourself, right? Be unique as much as you can, be clear and stand over your choices because you have to stick to them and be consistent. Lock those in into a style guide. Now that you have that going and that's your voice as well. Not just your visuals, right? And then Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: when you get given a brand kit on Canva, now you can stick those in. Now there are very quick ways to get past that manually. You can put those in, but I've seen people where all they did was they came to me with a logo. And she says, I love my logo. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: And the graphic designer made this logo for me. And it's got all the right Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: colors. It's got all the right colors. But I want my brand to look like my logo. And do know what? Thanks to AI, and thanks to Canva AI. We can actually do that with you now. You can upload your Sinéad Walsh: Amazing. Elish Bul-Godley: logo, extract the style. the graphic design style guide from your logo. says, these are the colors, the hex colors. It says, this is the graphic illustration. We're going to pull those out, can reuse again. We're going to mimic what was happening. And it said, you get an icon, you're like, now we're going to create more icons just like your logo. But the AI can help you with that. You've got that support in Canva. So if you've got a brochure, say a graphic designer made you really nice brochure back in the 1990s, that's for those of you who live then. I'd say not you, Sinead. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. I was, yeah, I'm a nineteen ninety baby. Elish Bul-Godley: Back in the 1990s, right? Like you have like the flyer, the printed flyer, and it was beautiful. It was you, right? It was you. And, but the graphic designer did it for you. And now you're looking at a Canva screen and then the Canva like, okay, I want to make like stuff that looks like this, like this brochure, because the brochure is like, everything is perfect. It's my brand, but I don't, my graphic designer passed away and I have to do it myself. Like just, just imagine a situation like that. So then you can download Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: the PDF, get it into Canva and Canva can pick it apart. And it can pick it apart and Sinéad Walsh: Amazing. Elish Bul-Godley: you can recycle the materials that are there. There's a thing called a PDF converter in Canva. There's a thing called magic layers, right, Debbie? Magic layers, put a, Debbie Ringwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's fantastic. Elish Bul-Godley: you upload a PDF printed document, right? You upload it there, you switch on magic layers edit and it can actually pull out all the different things that were used, right? The colors. the icon, the logo, can take it, extract all the elements, the fonts, and then you can recycle those in your next design or keep using that as a brand template, as a brand design template, right? So this is like, Sinéad Walsh: Brilliant. Elish Bul-Godley: even if all you had was one logo, you can actually move from there, right? And of course, embellish and bring it further and further. But best practice, everybody, from a brand manager's perspective, lock in what you stand for. Now, branding is an organism. you grow with your brand. So if you want to add more things over time, but just trying to stay as consistent as possible. you can even now with the AI and the Magic Write, which is the AI writing tool, you can Sinéad Walsh: Yes. Elish Bul-Godley: lock in your brand voice. you can speak into the, my friend Alva has a farm business and she doesn't know what her brand voice is. I told her to speak

into the machine. This was her AI, like she just speak and it transcribed it, right? And then we put in her transcription in there and it extracted her brand voice. Yeah. So this is like, these are the things you Sinéad Walsh: Wow, that's so interesting. Elish Bul-Godley: can do. Maybe work Canva with your chat GPT together and you could come Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: up with a solution. it's, if you don't need, I'm so sorry to say you don't need me anymore to do this for you. That used to be my Sinéad Walsh: Ha ha. Elish Bul-Godley: job. That used to be my job. People would call me and they would pay me and I would sit down with them and we workshop. Now you actually have this thing that you can actually speak to it. Tell it what you like, upload the things you like, and it will help you form one of those brand kits for you. That's my take. Yeah. Sinéad Walsh: Brilliant. That's fantastic, Elish. Thank you so much. A lot of gems in there for sure. The speaking into the AI model and getting to transcribe it and using that as a baseline for the the voice is absolutely brilliant. So good on you. okay. I want to turn to our very special guest today. So Karen, how are you feeling? Are you okay to to have a chat with us for a little bit? Karen O’Beirne: Absolutely looking forward to it, Sinead. Sinéad Walsh: Listen, thank you so much for being here. We're absolutely ecstatic to have you on. So, Karen, what I'm going to do is I was gonna do a little intro about your company, but I think this kind of thing is always best coming from the horse's mouth. So, Karen, will you tell us a little bit about Timeless Ceremonies and what your business is about and then the kind of content you need for your business? Karen O’Beirne: Okay, so my name is Karen O'Beirne and my company is Timeless Ceremonies. I'm a wedding celebrant and legal salmoniser. So that means that I can legally marry couples all across Ireland, including Northern Ireland, and I travel the whole of the 26 counties, by the way, and also the six up in the north. I'm quite busy at the moment, so how I would use Canva it's been a game changer for me, to be quite honest. And I have Debbie to thank for that. I have completed, I think, three of Debbie's courses and one was in person in the Thrive Centre in Navan. I would use Canva quite a lot. I have my brand kit, which you've been talking about there. I have that, my logo, everything in there, and I pull it across for all of my social media posts, for anything that I do, I've created ebooks and I have Debbie once again to thank for that. She put that idea into my head. So for my couples, I have a lot of information to give them and I didn't want to give it out on one sheet of paper because they're paying a premium price for my services, and I wanted a premium product to give them. And that's where I found this really invaluable. So like Debbie will probably show you later on my first attempt, which I thought was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I was so proud of it. I can't tell you how proud of it I was. And then I tried to send it off to couples and it was too large because my little glittery hearts. I had glittery hearts they they were beautiful. It was gorgeous. well Sinéad Walsh: Who doesn't love a glittery heart, Karen? Who doesn't love it? Karen O’Beirne: I tell you, do you know when Debbie says less is more? She's dead right. Because I had this graphic here, I had this here, I this layered here, it's something else layered, Elish Bul-Godley: gosh. Karen O’Beirne: because I thought it had to look pretty. Okay, behind the text. So I learned. So Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Karen O’Beirne: I learned very quickly, especially when I had to I couldn't send it as a PDF. But no, it's been fantastic. And then even I say when I get quiet times, the bulk create feature, everything is just great for social media posts. But for me personally, it has to have been like doing my ebooks. They're just an invaluable resource. They're sitting on my website now at the moment as well. I send them, as I said, to all of my couples. Once they book with me, they get a certain amount that are just there and then whatever they need they get. And I'm actually quite proud of that. And they all look consistent. So they're like a little library now. So my brand identity is all over them. So fantastic. And I just I can't thank Debbie enough, to be quite honest, and all of you guys as well. I literally can't. I'd be lost without Canva right now and without your support and all your help. Sinéad Walsh: Really incredible to hear. Really incredible. And again, like we were talking about, it's kind of that empowering thing that Canva are pushing and that we absolutely believe in as well. So that is magic to hear. Can I ask Karen, right? Before Debbie waltzed into your life, where were you with Canva before attending the programme? Had you used it much yourself or what tools were you using? Karen O’Beirne: So I was a general manager in a hotel Sinead, right, for nearly 20 years before I changed careers. So I had people doing this for me. Okay. I didn't have to do any of this. I had not got a notion until my very good friend was creating my save the dates for my wedding there two and a half years ago. And then she said Canva, and I like, let on I knew what it was, hadn't a notion. So I said, that's lovely. So I went and I downloaded the app. Then I started working around at myself and realized I actually knew nothing. So that's when I got on to Debbie. So I did, I think, the initial training to Canva for beginners, I think is the one I did because I really was a beginner, a real novice. And then once I kind of mastered that, I went on and did the next one, advanced Canva for business. And then I just kept going with it. But I knew nothing Sinead. Sinéad Walsh: Brilliant. Karen O’Beirne: I'm not Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If somebody said Canva, I was like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Not a clue. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Karen

O’Beirne: Not a clue. Not a clue. So now I'm pushing it to everybody. Sinéad Walsh: Brilliant, brilliant. Now I know you mentioned there that you love Debbie's kind of less as more thing, but what would you say has been the biggest thing you've learned? Karen O’Beirne: my biggest thing, to be quite honest, and I was having a think about it yesterday, it really the game changer for me has been being able to create the ebooks that I need. As I said, when I was getting married, I got resources through from whoever was marrying me as well, but they didn't appeal to me. And I wanted mine to be visually to represent my brand and represent me and Timeless Ceremonies. So it's all cohesive. That's what I wanted. And I was very much Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Yeah. Karen O’Beirne: aware that couples getting married as well didn't have everything at their fingertips. It was all over the internet in various different places. And I wanted to bring that in to what I could offer people. So for me, that's been a game changer for me. And also I think the bulk create feature as well, where I can just do like a month's worth of social media and have it ready there just to go out without even necessarily thinking about it. And it's in my brand colours and what I want as well. That's been massive Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Karen O’Beirne: to me, yeah. Sinéad Walsh: That's incredible. It really is, Karen and fair play to you. I really respect you so much. You know, like you're in my opinion, not sound too cheesy, but like it that's you showing up for yourself and your business. And I think that's incredible. Elish Bul-Godley: Thank Sinéad Walsh: So, you know, by grabbing it with both hands, kind of thing. So Debbie, if I can just turn to you for a second. So what what do you see happening when people move from kind of knowing the basics of Canva to like Karen here, understand how to use it properly for their business. Debbie Ringwood: Huge relief, first of all, because it's often one of those things that sits on the to-do list that somebody in the office is going to do at some point. And you can usually tell the business where nobody really wants to do it because they post at 11 o'clock at night, because somebody has said they have to post on Tuesday, so it's done just before they go to bed. So you start to see them to turn up more often. So they might be consistent and turn up every single day or even five days a week, but you start to see different types of post as they start to experiment as well. And then you see that they have a little bit of fun with it as well. Is Canva is actually it's quite user-friendly. So when you start to use it and start to look at the fun features as well, there's actually there's a bit of enjoyment in like seeing what you actually can bring together. Because even if you have not been trained in graphic design, and none of us here have been, you can create something that looks absolutely amazing. That can go out on a print campaign, it can go onto any social media, it can go out on emails, it can go onto websites. There are things that you would have had to try and explain to somebody in the past, but now suddenly you can do it all yourself. And if you don't quite like something, you can say, Well, what if I just change the colour at that or I move that one across a little bit to the left? So relief is that huge, huge feeling, Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah. Debbie Ringwood: and you can see it straight away because somebody who may have posted six months ago on their Instagram, they suddenly start to post every single week. So you think, okay, they're using the tools there that are going to make life much easier for them, or they have brand templates in place where they know what they're going to do. or the bulk create that Karen has mentioned. Bulk create is absolutely fantastic. It's a brilliant way to get loads of content out together. So they can relax. They're going to get things done. It's not going to sit at number eight or nine on their to-do list. It'll go up near the top because they won't mind doing it. And I always advise people to try and do like a morning of bulk content creation as well. So not just the bulk create app, but rather than have to actually say, well look I need to spend 20 minutes or 10 minutes or five minutes a day on it. Just spend the first Monday of the month on it or the first Tuesday, whatever is appropriate. And in three or four hours, you might have video, you might have graphics, you might have anything that in email, whatever you need that month all done, and you can schedule it all. Because you can actually even schedule it from within Canva as well. So you don't even need to download it to to get everything in order for the whole month. And then you can just sit back and watch for the comments coming through or for anything else that you need to engage in. So It's going to actually make the whole content creation process so much easier. Sinéad Walsh: Brilliant. Brilliant. And Elish, if I can turn to you and ask you the same question. So when you see people develop their skills in Canva and understand how to use it properly, what do you see happening? Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah, I want to echo that sense of liberation and excitement that they feel and like the fear is gone. And you can see, and I've been through it myself. That was my own journey too. I just felt so liberated. Like I could express myself and I could like think something and it happens on the page. Like literally, right? And also they get a lot of confidence about if they can navigate around Canva. Here's the secret. I'm going to give you, right? If you can navigate around Canva and you feel really confident with the drag and drop model and where the tools are, I'm going to tell you now, if you use another desktop application like CapCut, or you start playing with all these other tools like Biteable or gamma.ai for presentations, you'll find that the navigation is very similar. So Canva has kind

of schooled you in on the UX, right? So you can go somewhere else, go, yeah, yeah, I know this is where all the tools are usually kept in the left-hand side. So then it just gives you that confidence to use other tools. I found that happening in myself, right? That that started, that started making, and just that sense of I can do anything now, right? that you can see people go, I don't have to wait anymore for somebody else. don't have to, their budget, right? I don't have to pay for people to do that stuff anymore. I can just think and make straight away. So then it actually opens up their strategic head. That's the side effect. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: So the spin-off is like, now they're not afraid of strategy. Somebody gave them, and Karen, you've been through the digital marketing playbook, right? The playbook comes in and here's all the things you need to make and you've been given a strategy to do and you make it. And now you feel like, I can execute that, no big deal. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: No big deal at all. Like they say I need to create an audio book. Yeah, sure, no big deal. I can record that, okay. Like I need to make an ebook, I can do that, no big deal. So it actually takes away the fear of not just design, but the fear of can execute on my content strategy, you know? And I can get to my customers faster. Like I can respond to trends. I can respond to trends straight away. Like if a trend comes in, I can make something, react to it, send it out. Like, you know, cause I can take something that's fast moving and be agile as a business. So agility, that's a lovely word. Yeah, I think that's a nice one to add. to the liberation that Debbie talked Sinéad Walsh: I Elish Bul-Godley: about. Sinéad Walsh: I agree. I agree. Liberation and agility, fantastic words there. for the next section, and this is for our viewers as well. So if you are listening to this episode, you might want to go and have a look at the YouTube video or the visual content for this because what I want to do now is kick it to Debbie and Elish to show us some of the more practical features worth knowing within Canva. Okay, so I would like Elish to start with you if that works. And Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah. Sinéad Walsh: yeah, just ask you the simple question what Canva feature do you think more businesses should know about? Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah, so we'll start the demo soon. What I'm going to do in this demo is just give you a sense of what's available to you. I'm going to show you the building blocks of what you can do, where everything's located, roughly, and just point out the great editing features that you may not have realized were there. And then we're going to move on later on to Debbie, and she'll take it to the next level, right? Because she's like the Canva black belt in this room. Right? So wait for me. I'm just going to do the demo now. So I'm about to share my screen. So we are now looking at the Canva Home Dashboard, right? So if you are walking into your Canva account, like just for full disclosure, this is a pro account. It's a paid for subscription. There might be some features that you might not see on yours if it's a free account. If you see anything on my dashboard that's got like a little crown next to it, you'll know that that is the pro feature that we're dealing with. Okay? So that might be something you need to upgrade to. All right, so as you can see, when you come in here, the big open prompt is what will we design today? So you can search for anything that you've made already and labeled already. Do you remember I told you what a tidy freak I was, right? This is the Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: thing. I used to have files and you can see these are all like things I've made in the past. So the things you made in the past might come up. So you can actually lay your hands on them really quickly. It's like, think of this like your desk. You can lay your hand on something like, boom, I can pick up the thing I was just working on. It's on my desk, right? Or if you've got a pile of papers on your desk, right? If you didn't label those papers with color-coded folders, you wouldn't know which was which, right? So here, if you didn't label your design, remember, we said to label them, then if you label them correctly, you can just say, I'm working on a Kil kenny campaign, so I can type in Kil kenny. And if the label wasn't Kilkenny, I can pick it really quickly. So my biggest flaw, you said what mistakes? People are like, my mistake was I used to have files that like, copy of a copy of a copy of copy of the Kilkenny reel. So then I would have like everything was named the same and I forgot to label them. the other thing you'll see is a lot of options. Now, remember I said Canva opens up people's minds as to what they can make. So everybody's just obsessed with social media. But when you look at this, you can see that you can make different types of video, whether it's landscape for YouTube or whether it's a video ad for... for TV or it's a video display for display advertising on search. You can make a five second GIF if you wanted to. So it does open up a lot of things. You can create flyers and posters and things like that. So for example, if I clicked on social media, what it does is it opens up all your potential things that you could make on social, whether it's a, and not just the post, right? You can make the headers and you can make things like that. So it's a nice little reminder, right? So if you went into videos, for example, It says different shaped videos that you can make. That's also social, but also YouTube, right? You can make squares. You can make other things. When you say print, these are things like business cards have a really basic thing. And my, I used to work for the Snap Printing franchise in Ireland. And I learned a lot about print while I was there, you know? So when you go to create something in print here, don't forget you

did download it as a PDF for print with crop. and bleed marks. That's a little thing that's available to you you download something. So just a little tip there for small business owners. If you're sending it to the printer, download it as a PDF for print, with crop and bleed marks. And then you can make posters, invitations, so on. Docs, that's the Canva write, which is a bit like a chat GPT, right? Because you can go in there and you can create a document as the AI or just write out the document. So you want to have a nice little written proposal or memo for print as well. You can create something there. There's a sharing tool called whiteboards. So you can actually use that for a mood board, or you can use it for a collaborative tool. You can invite somebody to share with you and you can create ideas together and so on. Great if you want to use it as a teaching tool as well. And also if I used it with my graphic designer, actually. So I used to be the brand manager in Snap and I was surrounded by graphic designers. Like they were all, they were in every single Snap franchise office, right? So all I did was I created one of these babies. And I just did a mock-up of what I thought I wanted the billboard poster, which we were designing. And the graphic designer would take my mock-up and he'll actually tidy it up and make it like a proper high resolution print file for me. So like I use that to collaborate with my graphic designers. So graphics still matter, right? Sheets, again, Sinéad Walsh: Absolutely. Elish Bul-Godley: you can use like spreadsheets, you can create them. And this is important if you're doing the bulk grade, you wanna upload to maybe your, what we call the variable. data, right? So the variable data and in that we used to do thing called variable printing as well, whereby if I have say I'm sending out proposals to like five different people and I put out all the contact details in each one and then I can match it up with one single design. So I'll have five versions, each one with the variable information that is the person's name, person's company. And so I have to lock them into a sheet, right? So that's how, you know, you know, those, Campaigns Sinead where you get the Pepsi can with your name on it. Sinéad Walsh: Yes. Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah, Nutella, Nutella jar and it's got your name on it. You know that camera? So that's Sinéad Walsh: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: called variable printing. They would have something like this with all the contact details and then they get the printer and they match it up with the base design, the base template that you have and then you can bulk create. But each thing Sinéad Walsh: Wow. Elish Bul-Godley: that gets spit out of the printer and in this case out of your Canva would be an individual design with their own name on it. So you can also do code. think Debbie will speak to that. There's websites as well. There's a whole email sort of a challenger to MailChimp, I suspect. And even

if there's nothing here that fits the thing you want to make, say you wanted to make a sticker in the shape of a star, you can actually get a customized shape to open up on your Canva and then design within that shape and then send it off. So even if there's something very specific that you want to do, Canva gives you that space to do it. Work your way through this and you might just see some things that you didn't realize you could make. And of course, there are templates. OK, so if you wanted to create something and the next thing I'm going to move on to, guys, is templates. So remember I said templates open up that blank page for you. So if I said, let's take something that we're all very familiar with, an Instagram post. Right. So we wanted to make a template and not have to work with a design straight off. Yeah. Or I could have saved. Remember we said, organize your ideas. So I have saved some earlier that were brand templates for local enterprise office, for example, which we had featured in our show as well. And full disclosure, they're a client of ours, right? So I would say, okay, say I'm gonna tick something crazy like that. And then I just click it in, but I don't have to stick with that, right? So this is where your branding comes into play. If you know you have a different photo, you can drag and drop. So remember we said drag and drop model. So that's just the visual to show you what drag and drop means. Then the next best friend of yours apart from templates. So even if I said, I've got a, I got a farmer's market. I don't know why I came up with that, but I've got a farmer's market. so yeah, that's where we're at. So I'm Sinéad Walsh: Where we're at now, yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: sick and look, I can add another page, right? Got a farmer's market and I'm going to pick a template from there. Something really nice and hipstery. Give me hipster. I'm feeling the hipster in it. Okay. So there you go. So then once I have a template, you're not stuck to it. So do you remember I said earlier on, If you have a template, don't make it necessarily as it is. Just make sure that it reflects who you are. So if you know that you are a particular reference, your color references like pink as opposed to yellow, your palette, then you can eyeball it if you wanted to pick a color anywhere you want. your left hand navigation bar is your best friend. Yeah. So you can pick anything or right. You can go into your brand kit. So now we're moving to that other thing I talked about. which is Brands. You can see here Brands. And this is where you might need a Pro account. So if you have your Brand Kit, you can pick out your colors from there. So if I was, my Brand Kit was already locked in, right? And I decided, okay, I want to choose a color for Sundays, right? I don't have to stick to that. I can pick my Brand Kit and choose for my locked in colors. Remember I said, lock in your palette, lock in things like that. This is my secondary palette. So that's just a

bit of jargon. from brand guidelines. You can have your primary colors and your secondary. So I said, I'm going to lock it. I'm going to make this the LEO color. And I'm going to turn that into LEO green as well. So you can actually change that. can take anything out. So think of your design as layers. You have the ability to fix any layer you want. Just highlight it. You've got a little purple square. And once you can highlight something, you can shift it. You can move it. This is your second best friend. So navigation, you can pick things out like text, elements. If I wanted to put in a star, no, let's pick a vegetable. So let's pick a carrot. That's a good one. Sinéad Walsh: Paris. Elish Bul-Godley: Let's pick a carrot. I'm good with carrots. I like my human looking carrot or my real world carrot. So I'm going to take a real world carrot. See, all it did was a click. That's all it was. So keyword, way of searching for things. I could look for graphics. I could look for photos. I could look for videos. I could get a 3D carrot. I could look for shapes in the shape carrot, but sometimes not. If I said something like cowboy, maybe it might give me the song with cowboys in it. So that it might be easier. But even there's songs called eating a carrot, right? So that's your next best friend, your templates. Your next best friend is your elements. Your elements give you access. Remember we said earlier, stock images, stock videos that opens up this whole library. So you don't have to go looking. You don't have to go buying. You can, you can grab something that's there. If you're subscribed to Canva. then you have a wider library because that copyright is built in. It opens up a lot more, so that liberating thing that you're feeling. So let's dump our carrots in there, in the corner, Okay? So that's what we're doing, right? Now, your other best friend, apart from templates, elements, and brand, which we said you could have your brand kit in there, is that you have an editing bar. So if I took something like that and I click on an element, I have a full suite of editing tools, right? for that one Sinéad Walsh: Amazing. Elish Bul-Godley: carrot, okay? So for anything I want to edit, I click on it and then the editing tools come there. If I click on the carrot, my photo editing tools pop up. If I click on the text, my text editing room. So in here, I can pick any text font I want. Now, because I had a brand kit, remember? The LEO brand kit? So I know that LEO likes this sort of font, right? So I'm going to pick the LEO font and I can reduce the size, know, drag and drop, guys. Just use your fingers on your trackpad. That's all you need. And then you can change the alignment. Now I know from the fact that Debbie's got a thing with alignment, right, Debbie? Yeah, Debbie Ringwood: Yep, definitely. Elish Bul-Godley: so the thing to remember, Sinéad Walsh: Hey. Elish Bul-Godley: alignment is a thing related to text editing. We talked about accessibility. So in

the Western world, people read in an F shape. So here's a lovely graphic design tip, right? So if you want to put something in, start from left to right. Don't like, left to right, right? And if I do alignment, I can click on that and it changes the alignment of the text. So it's not centered. It's like it's left to right, right? So people read like in an F shape. If you're in the Arabic world or if you were in China, you actually read from the opposite direction. You read from right to left, right? So depending on who your audience is. So that's the thing you can do. This is some secret things I'm going to show you now. And they're not secret guys, but they're things that people forget to use. Remember you asked me. What are things like people don't use that they could be using? So if you have text, there's a lot of power over your text. You can not just change the font or the color, but you can also change the look of the text. So the problem I have with accessibility with a lot of people is that you can't actually see some fonts because they're so light. So if you have something like, here's one. If you have this, and you the color of the text was this. you see that? Nobody can see that, right? Because it's the right pain in the ass, right? To see. So here, that's not accessible. There's a gorgeous tool here. You can check for accessibility for your fonts. If you click on File, and if you go down there to Accessibility, and you can actually check your design accessibility to make sure that you're doing the right thing. So color contrast has been pointed out as an issue by the Canva AI. So then it goes, dude, your visit our website, that's not working girl. So, okay, so I got to do something Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: about it. So I'm going to click on that. And it's suggesting to me that like you want to be giving us some contrast girl. Okay, okay. Let's do that. So that's where we are working with AI now. It's just like help us get our designs. But remember I said, Canva got stuff locked in to help you do better in terms of how you do your graphics. So it's been really good educational tool in like sort of in a lot ways. So it affects how you use the thing sometimes. I want to make it stand out a little bit more. I can make it glow. Can you see the difference between the two? So that accessibility Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: thing, you can make it like three dimensional. You can make it, you know, have a little banner at the end. So don't forget that even your text effects can change. You can make it rounder, you know, you know, you can do things like all of these funny effects. So it just opens up a lot of things. So remember we said, don't stick with the template that you got. You can always move things around. And that's why you want to get that right. So the last thing I'm going to talk about is the branding and the organizational thing, which I was harping on earlier on. So remember we said brand kit, organize all your colors, all your pads. So this is what a brand kit is. It can give you all your assets. You can put in guidelines. If it's more than one person in your team, you can put in guidelines for that. You can save anything you've made earlier, stuff I made earlier. I've saved it as a brand template. Now at logos. Very obvious little, and I feel safe doing this because we all know guys that the local enterprise office is changing their branding today, right? So colors and fonts, right? Brand voice. Remember we talked about brand voice. You can add that in, right? You can write that in. Photos. You can upload your standard photos of your shop or your staff, the regular photos you use in your brochure, your graphics and so on. Now, if you wanted to create a new brand, right? You can create a new brand kit. Right. And here's the thing. And Debbie actually taught me this, right? Once you created the brand kits, I'm going to say Kilkenny, right? And then I've got a new campaign that I have to do. Like you can just add stuff. You can add stuff manually, but you can also put the URL in and it will learn how to do. So I did one earlier. Let's see. I've got one. And we did that with a content plan as well. We could just put the content plan URL in and we were able to find the brand kit. So if I Sinéad Walsh: Wow. Elish Bul-Godley: created something like a campaign that I've just got from a client, for example, I can put in their URL. The Canva AI will read their website and it will generate the of the brand kit there for me. So that's what we're doing. Sinéad Walsh: That's incredible. Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah. Like if you want to see what a fully fledged brand kit looks like, right? I'm going to show you Enterprise Ireland, full disclosure, also people we work with. And there's like, it's fully occupied, right? It's pulled out all the stuff and you got all the colors in, it's got all the fonts, it's got some images, it's wrapped around from the website and so on. And it's even like, I actually uploaded PDFs from them and I took that PDFs apart and I was able to use it as well. So that's a really nice thing. I also gave you an idea about brand. Remember, we said you could start with something and then make it your brand. And even if you don't have the free account or whatever, you don't want to learn how to use BrandKit just yet and do it manually and upload everything. You can actually do this little trick I learned. All I have is my logo. So I could say, I'm not going to show you, but I could say I'm uploading the logo here. Right. So I started with this, right. And then this is what I made later. I uploaded the Liffy Pay logo, right. And then I said to extract the brand style guide for me. It extracted the colors from the logo. It extracted the typography and everything. And then I said, okay, I couldn't find the brand kit, but let's use the style block from the logo and create the brand from there. So what it did was it extracted everything from the logo

and it turned this. into this, right? And it just developed my slide deck and it put in the colors from the logo in the background and so on. So how did I do something like that? Basically, when I clicked on the design, I went to Ask Canva and that's how I started that conversation. I've loaded logo here and we did. So that's a very fast thing you can do, even if you're like not ready to do the whole brand kit thing, you know, from scratch. The other thing is I talked about organization. So that's the last thing I'm going to do guys. So projects, right, is in the sidebar and you can create, you can see any projects you've done, but you can create folders. Okay. So you can create a new folder. It's just like a filing cabinet. And so for every project you have, you can create a new folder. For me, I have lots of different clients, right? So all my clients would be a different folder. So I open a client folder. I can put subfolders in them, right? And I can create folders for the graphics, folders for their designs I've made, shots of the photography that I took when I was in Kilkenny. Just say that's my Kilkenny folder. And then I could have them all here saved. So under that, I can look at all my designs, any images I've uploaded, any videos I've uploaded from the past. So it's all kept in that one place. So the next time I need to make a design, so for example, I'm making a carousel pose for Kilkenny. That's what I'm doing. So you can see this is the carousel post. It's about the Kilkenny. It's got the Kilkenny list. So I go, I want to make another thing. So here's the other time saver. I like this template. I click on the three. I can just go duplicate. So I'm making another one straight away. Again, time saver. And then if you want to change something or add something from my Kilkenny folder, I can go to my Kilkenny folder, right? And then I'm going to go to my projects, look for my Kilkenny stuff. I don't have to be digging around rummaging in so many places. I just go straight to my folder, look for graphics and logo. I want to put in some nice graphics. I'm going put in that graphic that I have from my Kilkenny folder and design it that way and add that in. I want to put that graphic in. I'll stick that in the background, position it behind that, and so on. So I can start just placing my hands on the forks in the kitchen really quickly because I know what drawer They're kept in to borrow that analogy. And that's how that speeds things up. Now, of course, we're only skimming the surface. So just to recap, when we're in the home page, here is your wide range of templates. You can also look for your templates at the sidebar. Open it up that way. You can look at your projects, organize all your materials in here. And you can see I've got multiple projects working. And you can also go into your brand kit. For those of us who have more than one brand, we can have multiple brand kits as well. And the other thing is, if you are one business like Karen O' Beirne, right, you can have different brand kits for different sub-projects. So for example, Karen, you might have a different project for different types of Ceremonies. You might change the main colors for that. Maybe you could create a different brand kit or, you know, a subsidiary brand kit with different fonts for that. Or might have a side hustle as well. So even if a small business Sinéad Walsh: Mm-hmm. Elish Bul-Godley: has one brand, the brand kit can... break that down into multiple things. think I've spoken out there, so as you can see, this is why our Canva classes are three hours long. And this is why we have Canva classes like Debbie has that go on for five or three lessons long. So you can see why I'm just scratching the surface for you. So you can see what's available. OK, I'm going to stop it there. And there we go. I could have gone on forever, Sinead, but I'm trying to impose some discipline at the moment. Sinéad Walsh: I'm I'm impressed at the self discipline. I really am. thank you so much for that, Elish. Even in that, you know, in that limited amount of time, you got through so much there. So thank you for that. and I use Canva every single day and I learned a lot there as well. So thank you. And if like I said, if you are listening to this podcast, I would thoroughly recommend that you go back and watch these particular segments. So to pass it to the karate kid. My my black Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah. Sinéad Walsh: belt. So Debbie, to build on what Elish was saying there, I would love to get a sense from you of kind of how we can be more productive with things like Canva apps and AI tools. Because I think, you know, if you expose your therapy yourself to Canva for long enough, you'll kind of get the the basics of the bits and bobs. So I want you to take us to the next level. Debbie Ringwood: Okay, I'm gonna do a demonstration now, and I'm gonna take it a little further than the basics that Elish has gone through. I'm gonna incorporate the brand kit, but I'm gonna show you how you can use AI features to make life much easier. Karen mentioned a feature earlier called Bulk Create, that's one of my favorites. So I'm gonna show you how to get started with something like that, but I'm also gonna encourage on different Ways that you can use presentations or how you can actually bring in existing content that you might have from other apps. I'm going to start the demo now. within your Canva account, there's a lot of different tools that you can use. And some of those are apps that are a little bit more hidden away if you don't know where to look from them. From the main dashboard, you can go to the bottom left, and if you select this option here, there's another pop-up here. There's a lot of different functions in here. One of them is the design school that I mentioned earlier. Lots of great lessons in there. But the one we're going to look at now is the apps tab. Within the apps tab, you have different sorts tools, everything

from Dropbox and Google Drive to AI avatar makers and music generators, there's lots of different tools in here. We're going to use a couple of these now just to show you how you can be more productive with Canva as well, because these are really exciting and there's lots you can do with it, and you can simplify your workflow. But we want to use things that'll make our day more productive. So I'm going to select one within a design to show you how we access these. First of all, I'm going to pick a template and I'm going to keep a really simple template. I'm going to do a search for a business tip. So you can create your own or you can just use one of the ones from the system here. And I'm going to take this option here. I'm going to customize the template and I'm going to apply my brand kit to this as well, just so that I know that I've I'm getting it the way I would like it to look. On the left-hand side on the navigation, there's the option for brand. And I've one brand kit set up in here. If I click into the colours and I just hover over them, it'll shuffle them for me a little bit as well. So I can get a few different variations of the colours there. So I'm going to go with this option here. At this point, I want to make a tip go into every one of these. So I want to create 20 of these to use for the year ahead for the next couple of months, and I don't have to actually go in and do them every single day if I don't want to. So I'm going to ungroup these so I can work on them. I have to change the font so that it matches the brand. So I can use the navigation at the top here. Let's change the font to scroll down and this one here, and we'll change all that's listed in my brand kit here. I want to have all this content and if I know all the tips that I want to share myself, that's great. That's absolutely fantastic. But if I need a little bit of help at coming up with these, I'm going to just change the heading first of all there to marketing tip. I can use another tool within Canva. Now I can use any of the tools that are out there, any of the AI tools that I particularly like, but I'm deliberately going to use one within Canva here called Canva Doc. And if you've opened this up before, it looks really basic. So there's a lot of different parts within this. Area on Canva. I can go in and it can hit the plus button here and it'll give me prompts. It's not giving me the prompts there straight away. Okay. I'm just going to use Magic Write, but I can actually go straight in here and get prompts that I can actually customize to suit. So if I wanted to do a blog article, I can use Canva for that as well. So it's not just about great graphics and video, it allows me to do lots of different things and it gives me the starting point for lots of different situations, blog posts, list. LinkedIn articles, listicles, marketing strategy documents. There's loads of them in here that you just customize to suit. So you would just click into this and change whatever you want around within this. For now though, I'm going to actually go straight into Magic Write, which is the AI text generation tool as such within Canva. I'm going to ask it then to create 20 marketing tips for small business in Ireland. I'll get it to use UK English, each a sentence long. bullet points and no headers. I can make this as detailed as I want, so I'm just gonna hit the submit button over here. Now these are the tips that I want to take and put onto that particular template that I had on the other tab a moment ago. So, first of all, things that I can do, I can insert them. And just to show where brand voice that Elish mentioned comes into it as well, I can highlight all of these just to ensure that I've got it correct. If I want to hover here at the end, there's the three dots again that I've mentioned. There's options here for magic right, and I can actually ask it to change the brand voice there. So just to ensure that it sounds right. So it's gone into an awful lot more detail. I'm going to leave that one alone completely. But the brand voice can be applied at lots of different points, and that's one way to do it there. So let's copy these and just use the control C on my keyboard. And I'm going to go over to that productivity tip that I have here, which I've now called marketing tip, just to name them. I'm gonna go in and find an app and I'm gonna look for one very specific app called Bolt Create. So on the navigation, go right down to where we find apps and I'm looking for Bolt Create. There. And the bold create appears here at the top, no icon for whatever reason, I'm not really sure. But I'm going to ask it to bold create here. I can import the data in any different format. So I can upload a spreadsheet if that's easier for me, but I'm just going to enter the data manually here. So I get a Canva sheet, which is their own version of an accounting type software for a spreadsheet. And I'm going to give my file a name. So I'm just going to call this CP for content plan November 26. And I'm going to use the control V to paste my my content in there. So this is my 20 marketing tips. And it's done. So when I go back over here, I can actually get it to match and fill the fields. So there's the the file that I've just created there. If I ask it to match it's going to pick up where it should go. Now I can do it manually if I want as well and I'm prompted at the bottom left here to create one design. This is my design here with multiple versions of my tips. So the 20 that I actually asked it to create for me here, when I go through these, these are all different. So the first one there is on SEO. Then the next one is collaboration. I can go through them all there, and all the different tools will be there. If I want to see what I have, there's a little grid view bottom right, and it shows me all of the different tips that have been created. And what I tend to do myself is if I'm going to use this one here, and this is let's go

with the first one. This one here is on SEO. I'd go into elements and just pick an image that works for that. Let's pick a photograph and there's something with SEO. Now, when I go back to my grid at the bottom right, I can see exactly what has been used. So if something is relevant, if I pop into this one here and I find okay, this one here is about Google Ads. So I might just go in, get that one there, look for a photograph, drag it into place, and then straight away. I can see looking at it from the grated view that I've used two of these and there's still 18 more to use. Now I don't have to actually download these if I really don't want to either. It's another part of Canva just to be aware of. If I wanted to go in and take the first one again, so I'm going to go back to the beginning. And take this one here. Within our home dashboard, there is actually another tool where we saw the apps tab. So let's go back to that for a moment. Down to the bottom right here, there's actually a content planner. So you can schedule your content directly from within Canva as well. Again, all about being as productive as possible. If I decide to share it, so just name the file there as well. If I decide to share here, I have a lot of different ways. I can share it directly to Instagram or I can go directly to the content planner. And if there's different tools that I'm already using, maybe I'm using Metrool or Hootsuite or something like that, all of these tools have access in here as well. I can go directly into Meta, into ads and that as well. So it's worth exploring all these to see what it is that you want to do. But just to show you the very basic one that we're going to use on Canva, if I want to schedule it here, now it is a paid feature, I would have to follow the prompts here to convert. make sure that I have an Instagram business account and link it up to my Facebook page. This is a brand new Canva account that I'm using today. But it is literally the case that you follow the prompts and you can connect them and it'll help you to generate captions to go on your Instagram or wherever you wanted to do as well. So that is one tool called Bulk Create. I leave it to the end of every training deliberately because straight away most people can see that this is going to make life much easier. So if I wanted to do 50 posts for the entire year and then keep Christmas and new year off. I can do all of those and have them scheduled, ready to go, and then just watch for comments as I come back. So that is one tool that is going to save you a lot of time. Another tool, which is Sinéad Walsh: That's Debbie Ringwood: one of my favorites, is presentations. And presentations, we all know that you know we want to make them as entertaining as possible for people if we can. We don't want to just literally have this loads and loads of content coming out without different you need something more than just white pages and a few nice pretty pictures on it. Canva is second to

none when it comes to creating presentations and actually delivering from within Canva as well is fantastic. It has a lot of different features there. So if I needed to create a presentation on something, I can go from the main dashboard into presentation here, but I can also get something completely unique that's generated just for me. So I can go in and I can find, a presentation on marketing. And I might want to do digital marketing. If I hover over there, it'll show me that there's a whole load of different pages there, and I can apply those and I can edit and change them as I can with everything else. But if I really don't know what I want to do, I can use Canva AI for this. So rather than just go through the regular templates, I might go into AI, which is over here on the left-hand side. So Canva AI is absolutely fantastic and it's improving all the time. I can select the option here to design a professional presentation deck. And I'm gonna say that this should be for marketing a small business at Christmas in Ireland. 10 pages and the audience is small business owners. If I have any references that I want to bring in, I can bring them in here. So I hit the plus and I can say let's bring in the brand kit. There's my brand kit there. If I had a template, I might want to bring it in there if I if I was going to have one for my for this particular deck. I don't in this case I'm going to leave that one out. So let's go back here. Say what apply the brand kit and we want to just get it to generate. Now not only will it generate the actual presentation deck for me, but it'll do the presenter notes as well. And I can present it from within Canva. So this is what it's suggesting is might be suited. That's our 10 pages, different areas, and it's like specifically referencing Ireland and Irish in there as well. So I'm not going to check the pages, but I can if I want by using the down arrow. Instead, I'm just going to go in and generate presentation. So I've given it no guidance in terms of you know what sort of imagery to put in there. I've kept it really, really vague, but you can be more detailed and say, look, this is the kind of style that we like. Let's see what it comes up with for us. But it should generate it really quickly. It's just working away there. Now on the left hand side it's opened up here so that it's actually allowing us to have a conversation. So when it comes back, it'll tell us we've created your presentation for you now. And then at that point I can go in and say, look, can you change this or whatever? But I'm gonna go straight into edit the design instead because when it's finished, everything will be fully editable. So what I'll do is Sinéad Walsh: Amazing. Debbie Ringwood: I can leave that working away there if you want to go onto another feature. hang on, it's got it there. So we don't have to even think for ourselves some of the time now. There's edit design. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: Thank Debbie Ringwood: And I'm going to show you just one of my other little favorites that is brilliant, particularly if you're going to record content, if you're going to record video content. So maybe you're a trainer or you do onboarding videos for H O or something like that. It's telling me over here the task is completed. So at the top here, I can present this back from full screen. Now it actually looks really good and that's uniquely mine. Now I haven't given it any kind of guidance on that at all, but you my prompt was very basic. At this point I can go in and I can edit everything I want. But if I have to do a presentation today on a topic that I'm not comfortable with, or I just I'm short on time and I'm not ready, I'm not prepared. At the bottom left hand of my screen here, there's an option for notes. So I'm going to click on the first page to start off with. And there's notes there. I can actually ask it to do to generate some presenter notes for me. And I love this. So at this point, you can see in the notes there, it's telling me to pause for a moment to engage the audience. So and then it tells me to smile warmly after another few words. So if I want to record this, nobody's going to know that I don't actually know what I'm talking about or that I'm a little bit nervous because all of this is actually set up to help me to get as easy as possible to work with. Within Canva, we can hit present at the top, and full screen is what I would generally use for the likes of training. But I have presenter view here, so I can see my notes will appear on the right-hand side and I can talk through whatever I want. And I also have present and record. So a little mini recording studio. When you go to the recording studio, you can set up your camera and whatever you need there. And you can just talk away and record everything you want. So I'm just going to get out of the recording studio there now. But you can Literally record your videos in there if you want to as well. So it is absolutely fantastic for different areas like that. If I then wanted to save this, so because I really like the presentation that I've come up with, let me just open it up here, back to the home page. There's my my presentation here. If I decided I was going to use this style of presentation going forward forevermore, that's where I can go into share. And I've got different options here. I might want to keep it as a brand template. So three dots here. And then I'm looking for the brand template option. I can share it with somebody else as a template link as well. So I can share it to anybody who has access to Canva. They can open it and they can they can actually start to use it. But if I share it as a brand template, I can pick a folder for it to go into. If I don't have a folder set up, there's a content plan folder here. I can move it in there. And then I can pick a brand kit and I can add it in there as well. So when I go in and publish and closing, from that point onwards, it's never

going to affect the original design. It's going to keep it exactly the same way as a Canva template would be. If I want to go in and use it, it's unaffected, it stays there. So I can do this for sales decks and social media posts or events or product pages, whatever it is that I'm going to need. That's really, really useful. Sinéad Walsh: That's brilliant, Debbie. And thank you so, so much. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: What's up, Debbie? What's up, little old? Sinéad Walsh: That was incredible. And thank you so much. And I think, folks, if you enjoyed that, please keep an eye out for upcoming Canva classes, especially the ones that Debbie is involved in. I think it goes without saying that yeah, absolutely Elish Go for Elish Bul-Godley: something, Sinead? I just want to say that, my God, when you watched Debbie's demo, it was like, could see why you need four five classes of Canva. Yeah. And Sinéad Walsh: I absolutely Elish Bul-Godley: like personally speaking, like, not trying to flog anything, but like, know, I've had to, like, come to me and go, we had to break it down into five, because you could actually see the depth of like, we still just scratched the surface. You know what saying? Sinéad Walsh: percent. Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah, so yeah, it's just so interesting. Every time Debbie comes on, you realize the stuff like you didn't even know existed, you know? Sinéad Walsh: I know, I know, yeah, there was so much I took away. Yeah, absolutely. Debbie Ringwood: It's great fun. Yeah. There's there's all there's always something new and there's more features coming up as well. I know there's a couple of new features launched and I'm testing them at the moment, but I will put them out on social media rather than through here today. Sinéad Walsh: Amazing. Debbie Ringwood: Just to make sure they work out well. Sinéad Walsh: You heard it here first, folks. Keep an eye on Debbie's social media. please do. Debbie, where can we find you on social? Just so just for the record. Debbie Ringwood: You'll just find me under Debbie Ringwood or the Marketing Shop, either one of those. Sinéad Walsh: Boom, there you go. Okay. Cheeky little plug there. I saw the opportunity and I crossed the ball in for you to head Debbie Ringwood: Thank you. Sinéad Walsh: it in the net, right? So, folks, just to wrap up, there is so much that has been involved in this episode. And like we said, we could keep going for hours. But I just want to ask each one of you a final question, if you'll bear with me. Karen, I'm gonna start with you, if that's okay. So, what advice would you give to someone who is using Canva or wants to use Canva in their business? Karen O’Beirne: Don't be afraid of it. just get comfortable with it and just experiment with it. And just definitely don't be afraid because we all have to start somewhere and it's such a great tool. You'd not regret using it whatsoever. Sinéad Walsh: Absolutely couldn't agree with you more. Elish to kick it to you. In your opinion, what is one thing people need to think about or bear in mind before they start creating content within Canva? Elish Bul-Godley: means clean as you go, right? You could see why I was harping on about it. So clean as you go. So, you know, first try every button, like Debbie says, go click every button, look at all the apps, just know where everything is, right? Get a basic class or whatever, just so that you can get to play with it for a bit. And then organize what you've got. I've been harping on about that. And then of course, you know, as you're making things, making sure that you're putting it in the place like Debbie had a really good tip there where she talked about saving something as a brand design template and then putting it into the right folder and so on. like, like I had that problem. I used to not label my stuff, label yourself and put it. So it's just that being a small business, only if you want to save time. The other, just want to add one more thing. You had said something really nice, Sinead, about the ad shells and how you could tell it was a Canva template. So I just want everybody to remember. that there's a lot of things that are there that everybody else is using at the same time as you. So just don't forget to run with your creativity. Use it to express yourself a little bit more. There's lots of little tiny things they've got. There's a nice Canva color generator, a color wheel that helps you explore different color palettes. It sits outside the main Canva dashboard. So you just type in Canva color generator. They've got things like text to speech or Canva audio recorders. If you type that in, you can actually pull out that as a separate landing page and you can record your... So there's lots of other things Canva does. like try and like discover everything they've got. And maybe you might pick one thing today and play with it, pick another thing next month, that sort of Sinéad Walsh: Beautiful. Absolutely. Great, great advice there. And Debbie Sentei. what's one Canva feature or design habit that you think everyone should learn? Debbie Ringwood: Don't be afraid to explore. Press every button, see what happens. Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah. Debbie Ringwood: You won't break it. You if it was possible to break it, I'd have done that a long time ago because I press everything I see. So Elish Bul-Godley: You Debbie Ringwood: don't be afraid of anything at all. Everything that you do is designed to help you become a better designer or to be more productive in what you do. So, yes, first and foremost, we're using it for templates and to get great designs out there, but you can see that if you really, really wanted, you can get your emails done there. You can actually go in and do all of your You can have an app to manage your business in there. You can code it for yourself. Everything that you need within your business, you can bring it back to Canva in some way, but you can actually link it to all the other

platforms as well. So save on subscription, save on passwords, which is one of the nuisances for I think every one of us, we've tried to remember all the different passwords. But if you have them all interconnected, that makes life much easier. Your workflow is going to be much more effective. And then just one other thing just to mention as well. I know Elish and I talked about this yesterday. Canva is building up a core memory of you all the time. So you don't Elish Bul-Godley: yes. Debbie Ringwood: have to constantly give it context and say, hey, this is what I do. So I'm just going to show you an example of what that looks like because there's a like a memory bank within the Canva AI section. And although I work with all sorts of different people and I do all sorts of random examples and training, it understands that despite all of that, it understands what I am. So I'm just going to share my screen and show you this one here. This is your about me. And this is what Canva is working on in the background. So we always talk about AI and how we have to make sure that we get to know it and it gets to know us. But this is happening in the background with Canva and it's been in place for about six months or so at this point. So I'm going to just share my screen. Now you can access through this through the Canva AI button from your main dashboard and it brings up this at the very end of the list there. Scroll down to where you see memory. Now when I go into memory here. It's going to talk about me. It understands what I do as a business. So it's like what do I do? I make marketing simple, make progress possible. I have never ever interfered with this. I have never edited it. This is what Canva believes that I do all the time. It goes through the type of clients that I work with, how I work, who I work with, credentials I have. It's picked up all this from me over the years without me having to go in and do anything. So if I really wanted to win and edit that a little bit, I can. But this is what it's working on all the time. So when it generates content for me, whether it's designs or AI, it's starting off with this as the context that we're working with in initially. So this is really, really useful as well. At some point on everybody's Canva, it will pop up on the screen and say, Do you want to read my about me? If you do, this is what it's doing. But it probably won't pop up until you have used it enough to make it make sense in the first place. But this is a great extra feature to be aware of as well. So it knows what you're doing. It's not spying on you. But it does understand what you're doing in the background. So it's just worth mentioning 'cause when we talked about it yesterday, we were both delighted to see the detail that it picks up. So I just stopped sharing. Elish Bul-Godley: Can I add a little note, can I Sinéad Walsh: That's incredible. Elish Bul-Godley: add a little note, Sinead, on the AI, because know know, Debbie's brought AI. I think that I've tried to make things with AI with a prompt, right? And I've tried to make things from scratch with a blank Canva the hard way. And at the very beginning, I said, it sits in the middle. I just want to let everybody know you could make things like lots of videos, you know, with Gemini with one prompt. But the problem with that, right? The problem with going, yeah, I can make a thing with one prompt in Gemini is that once you made it there, you used up all your tokens, right? And you can't tweak it easily because you have to prompt it again to get a small tweak in. Then you use Sinéad Walsh: Four. Elish Bul-Godley: up more tokens. What I like about Canva, and I can add that to my takeaways, is that when you create something with Canva AI, it saves it as an editable piece of work so that You don't have to keep prompting constantly. You can actually dive into the thing after the first thing. maybe she made the presentation. You could go in and you could tweak it manually. So you're not using up all those AI tokens unnecessarily. If you had tried to do it with Gemini, you had no control over it manually, right? So I think that's the lovely middle ground that sits with Canva. It gives you control over the AI in a way that you don't anywhere else. Sinéad Walsh: Brilliant. That's a fantastic tip. Absolutely. And you're you're you're so right as well. the big takeaway from today's episode, in my opinion, is that Canva can make creating content. Much easier. But as we discussed, good content still starts with the fundamentals like understanding your audience, basic design principles, hierarchy, having a clear message and using the right design approach. So I'd love to say a massive thank you to you, Debbie and Elish, of course. Thank you so much. And Karen, a massive special thank you to you too. Karen, where can we find you on social media? Karen O’Beirne: So I'm under Timeless Ceremonies on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. I'm everywhere. Sinéad Walsh: And know what? I was gonna say, do you know what does it for me there now is the consistent username across the platform. So just from a social media expert, thank you for for that. So Karen O’Beirne: Ha ha. Sinéad Walsh: Timeless Ceremonies is where you can find Karen folks. thank you all so much. This has been Digital and AI Decoded from Content Plan. If you found it useful, follow, subscribe, tell your mates about it, tell the nice lady down the shop that makes your sandwich at lunch, whatever you feel. is appropriate. I've been Sinead Walsh and be half all of us here at Content Plan. Thanks for listening, folks. Elish Bul-Godley: Have fun guys. Have fun.