What happens to your team's existing designs in Canva
Most of your staff will already have Canva accounts, with years of work in them. When those accounts come under your organisation's control, people want to know what happens to that work. This is the question that generates the most anxiety internally, and the answer is mostly reassuring.
Part of Setting up Canva Enterprise: how the rollout works, a guide from Refuel Creative for organisations moving to Canva Enterprise.
Most of your staff will already have Canva accounts, with years of work in them. When those accounts come under your organisation's control, people want to know what happens to that work. This is the question that generates the most anxiety internally, and the answer is mostly reassuring.
When this applies: Once people start joining your organisation's managed teams, which begins after your domains are verified.
Short answer: nothing is deleted, and nothing moves on its own.
People's existing work stays exactly where it is. The migration does not sweep designs into your organisation's team.
What can happen is that a user's personal team gets archived. This applies only when all of the following are true: it is a solo team where they are the only member, it was not bought through the App Store or Google Play, and that person has become affiliated with your organisation and joined a company-managed team.
When a team is archived, the user keeps access to it. Canva's wording: users "can still view and download past designs from your archived team" but "won't be able to: Create new designs, Edit existing designs, Share content." They reach it by switching teams from their account icon in the top right, and they can copy content across to your team whenever they like, in bulk if they want.
That access does not depend on holding an Enterprise licence. It stays with their account.
Not everything copies across
This is the detail that most often surprises people after the fact, so raise it early.
Designs, folders, websites, media and videos come over. Apps, published websites, fonts, audio, orders and invoices, comments, sharing permissions and brand kits do not.
If your teams have built brand kits or custom fonts in their own accounts, budget time to rebuild those in your organisation's team. For a marketing team that has spent years building brand assets in a personal Canva account, this is real work, and it is better discovered during planning than during go-live.
Teams with more than one member are not archived at all
They survive the migration untouched. If you want them folded into your organisation, that is a separate consolidation project: content gets copied team by team, and old teams can only be deleted by Canva Support, permanently.
We usually recommend leaving these alone until after your main rollout is finished, so they do not hold anything up.
Related articles
- Understanding your Canva user report
- Who actually uses a Canva Enterprise licence
- The email Canva sends when you verify a domain
Canva documentation
Canva updates its documentation without notice. If something here no longer matches what you see in your account, tell us and we will check it.