AI Exposure · Marketing and design
What Canva actually does with your data
The design tool half the sector lives in, free through Canva for Nonprofits. Whether your uploads help train AI depends on whose account they sit in.
- Trains on your data
- Depends on the account
- Processed
- Not clearly published
- Can you turn it off
- Yes, for managed teams
- Verified
- 3 July 2026, against Canva's published documents
What AI is in it?
- Magic Write. Generates and rewrites text inside designs and documents from a prompt.
- Magic Studio. The wider AI toolkit: designs from prompts, image generation and editing, resizing, translation. It is woven through the editor rather than sitting behind one button.
Does your data train AI models?
Depends on the account.
Canva's published position is "You are in control of whether we train on your private content." Where the control sits is the story: Canva's help pages confirm the mechanism, a Privacy controls tab under Settings with a toggle per permission, and a lock icon on preferences that managed team members cannot change.
On personal Free and Pro accounts the training preference is widely reported to be on unless the person turns it off, while content in managed Teams, Education and Enterprise accounts is excluded from training. This is one you can check faster than you can read about it: open Settings, then Privacy controls, on the account your charity's designs actually live in, and look at the toggle.
Where is your data processed?
Not clearly published.
Canva is an Australian company with global infrastructure, and I have not found a page that states plainly where your content is processed.
Its privacy policy and data processing addendum are the documents to check. If a clear statement appears, I will cite it here.
What changes between free and paid?
The account type decides.
Canva for Nonprofits gives registered charities the managed team tier free, which is the tier whose content is excluded from AI training.
So the gap here is not money, it is where the work happens: a charity properly set up on the nonprofit programme sits in the protected category, while the same posters made on a volunteer's personal free account do not.
Can your organisation turn it off?
Yes, for managed teams.
Administrators of a Canva team can change the team's access to Magic and AI features, and managed accounts show locked privacy settings members cannot loosen.
A personal account has whatever settings its owner chose, which for charity work means no organisational control at all.
What does this mean for the people you support?
What charities upload to Canva is mostly pictures of people: service users, volunteers, event attendees, sometimes children.
Those photographs were taken with consent for a newsletter or a fundraising appeal, which is not the same as consent to sit in a training set. The difference between a volunteer's personal login and the charity's own nonprofit team account decides which of those two things happened.
What to check this week
- Move the work into a charity-owned team. Canva for Nonprofits is free for registered charities and puts everyone's work in a managed team, under settings your organisation controls. If designs are being made on personal accounts, moving them is the single change that settles the training question.
- Check the toggle on any personal account still in use. Settings, then Privacy: look at the AI training preference on any personal account that touches charity work, especially anything with photos of the people you support.
- Review the team's Magic features access. Team administrators can decide which AI features are available to members. Make it a decision rather than a default.
Sources
Everything above is my plain English reading of what Canva publishes. The originals:
- Canva: Canva Shield, safe AI reviewed 3 July 2026
- Canva: Manage your privacy preferences reviewed 3 July 2026
- Canva: Change access to Magic and AI features reviewed 3 July 2026
Vendors change these documents quietly and often. If you spot something out of date, email me and I'll re-verify the entry.
A decision, not a setting
Canva has settings worth checking, and the list above covers them. But the real exposure here is not a switch left on. It is what gets uploaded, and no setting can tell the difference between a stock photo and a photograph of someone you support.
That makes this a rule to agree rather than a box to untick: which images are allowed to leave the building, whose account they travel through, and what the consent behind them actually covers. My free Charity AI Policy Generator writes that rule with you in a few minutes, in your browser.
See your whole toolkit at once
This page covers one tool. The AI Exposure Report Generator covers your toolkit: tick the tools your charity uses and get one report showing what the AI inside each of them does with your data, as a Word document you can table at your next meeting. Free, and nothing you tick leaves your browser.
The Report Generator, start to finish: tick your tools, read your exposure, download the report.
Read the other tools
The same questions, answered for every tool in the directory.
Your office suite
Microsoft 365 Copilot
The AI inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. It can reach whatever the signed in person can reach.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Google Workspace with Gemini
Gemini inside Gmail, Docs, Drive and Meet. Google says your content is not used to train models outside your domain. What it can reach is the longer answer.
Verified 3 July 2026 →AI chatbots
ChatGPT
The one your staff are probably already using. What happens to what they type depends entirely on whose account it is.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Google Gemini
Google's chatbot, one tap away on Android phones, in Chrome and in search. On a personal account, the training switch is on until someone finds it.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Claude
Anthropic's chatbot. The same personal versus organisational story as the others, with the training question put to you as a setting.
Verified 2 July 2026 →Meeting notetakers
Otter.ai
The notetaker that joins your meetings, and can invite itself to the next one. What it hears may help train its AI.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Microsoft Teams
The meeting recorder your charity already owns. Everything it captures becomes a file in OneDrive and SharePoint, where the rest of the AI can reach it.
Verified 3 July 2026 →
Zoom AI Companion
The AI inside the video calls much of the sector runs on. Zoom's no training promise is unusually specific, and there is a reason it is worded that way.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Fathom
The free notetaker that arrives one personal install at a time. The recordings live in the US, and the training answer has two halves.
Verified 3 July 2026 →Charity CRMs
Beacon
A UK charity CRM with AI on every plan since 2024. Beacon publishes where your data sits and how to switch the AI off, which leaves one question to ask them directly.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Donorfy
A UK charity CRM where the AI mostly arrives through the side door: optional integrations. What you connect decides where your supporter data goes.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
CiviCRM
The open source CRM ships no AI of its own. What that is worth to you depends on which CiviCRM you are running: one your organisation hosts, or a hosted product somebody sells you. Everything below splits along that line.
Verified 20 July 2026 →
Salesforce
In much of the sector through ten free licences. The AI paperwork is detailed and mostly reassuring, with one default that runs the other way.
Verified 3 July 2026 →Accounts
Xero
Your accounts package now has an assistant called JAX. Xero says your data is not used to train its AI, and names the AI companies your questions travel to.
Verified 20 July 2026 →
QuickBooks
Intuit's accounts package now has an assistant throughout. Its privacy statement says your information is used to train its AI models, and it says so in as many words.
Verified 3 July 2026 →Marketing and design
Mailchimp
Your supporter mailing list lives here, and Mailchimp belongs to Intuit now, which means the same small print as QuickBooks covers it.
Verified 3 July 2026 →
Canva
The design tool half the sector lives in, free through Canva for Nonprofits. Whether your uploads help train AI depends on whose account they sit in.
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