By Gavin Claiborne and Ryan Leon, May 6, 2025
The Cal Poly Pomona community voiced concerns over online privacy after Canva sent an auto-generated email to all active CPP email accounts April 9, regarding an upcoming management of CPP-linked Canva accounts by the Department of Strategic Communications.
According to the email, recipients were informed their Canva accounts “will be affiliated with CPP Strategic Communications soon,” as a later message read: “An admin from CPP Strategic Communications has claimed the email domain linked to your Canva account, which means it will become affiliated with your organization.”
Esther Tanaka, the executive director for StratComm, said the auto-generated email didn’t apply to everyone affiliated with CPP, though, but rather an approximate 70 people.
In an email sent to The Poly Post, Tanaka said StratComm has an “enterprise-level account with Canva,” and the department has been working on implementing single sign-on verification exclusively for all users who work in the department.
“The email you received was automatically sent from Canva as part of the SSO integration and domain verification process,” Tanaka wrote in the email to The Poly Post. “Once SSO is implemented for the StratComm account, only the users who are part of our group will be required to login with SSO.”
Tanaka also said any Canva accounts that aren’t linked to the department won’t be affected, and no further action would be needed.
“What we do want to point out is that the email was only applying to people within our team,” Tanaka said. “But they still had to send a notification to everyone with a cpp.edu email address that used Canva.”
Michelle Magcalas, the business systems analyst for StratComm, said enabling Canva single sign-on for members of the department requires a domain verification, but due to privacy laws and practices, the auto-generated email had to be sent to “people with a corresponding email that has cpp.edu” to inform them of the changes, too.
“It’s kind of like when you get something from your bank saying that something has changed,” Magcalas said. “Whether it applied to you or not, they still send it out to everyone, so that’s kind of what happened for us.”
Magcalas said StratComm reached out to Canva to confirm the affiliation wouldn’t affect anyone outside of the department, and Canva verified that to be true.
Tanaka said the department has been using Canva to design graphics for a few years now, but the team has recently expanded to using new templates that include design elements from CPP’s latest branding campaign. Those are available to staff within the department, including student assistants who create graphic designs for StratComm.
Magcalas said members of StratComm aren’t required to use Canva, but from her experience, people who’ve done marketing for different divisions have enjoyed “the ease of use and everything already being there.”
StratComm has worked with Canva to have the Australian-based company send a campuswide follow-up email notifying the CPP community their Canva accounts won’t be managed by the department, according to Tanaka.
“We want to reassure people, ‘You don’t have to change what you’re doing,’” Tanaka said. “‘You don’t have to change your email address, because nothing for you is changing.’ I wish we could share that message, but since we don’t know who uses Canva on campus, we don’t know who to email.”
Canva released a campuswide follow-up email April 28 for clarification on the initial email.
“You might have seen an email stating that your Canva account is being affiliated with Cal Poly Pomona Strategic Communications — and we understand how that could cause some confusion,” the email read. “The message you received was sent in error, and there’s no need to worry or take any action. Your account will not be affiliated with CPP Strategic Communications and an admin from CPP Strategic Communications will not control how you use Canva.”
Mia Healy, the Canva representative for StratComm and the account executive of higher education at Canva, said when a Canva customer is involved in an enterprise agreement of Canva, they are given access to single sign-on. This, according to Healy, is a more secure log-in option for Canva users.
Healy said due to StratComm’s enterprise agreement with Canva, the department also has access to Canva’s single sign-on authentication process, meaning it’s also able to obtain the cpp.edu email domain from that configuration process.
“We apologize for the confusion and totally understand that this type of email would cause a little alarm,” Healy said. “As a former student in the (California State University) system, I definitely leaned very heavily on my Canva account, and if I saw an email like that, I would be like, ‘Oh, what does this mean for me now?’”
Healy said any faculty, staff or students affected by this issue may reach out to their customer happiness team if they have any questions or concerns but not to worry because their accounts are still theirs and no interruptions or changes should occur.
Feature graphic courtesy of Connor Lālea Hampton