The pop-up isn’t the point of Wollongong Goals. What happens next is
Canva says the commitment is long-term
The most interesting thing about Wollongong Goals isn’t the purpose-built pop-up that landed at Belmore Basin on Friday.
It’s what happens after it disappears.
In the days before the three-day activation, letterboxes appeared outside libraries and community centres from the Botanic Gardens to North Beach and the suburbs. Residents were invited into a specially designed booth to record a message about the future, fill out a postcard, or go to wollongonggoals.org and submit one online, anonymously if they wanted.
The question is deliberately simple: what’s the one goal you want for your suburb, for Australia and for the world?
Wollongong City Council and Canva describe the pilot as a world-first. But the novelty of the pop-up is less important than what the two organisations do with the answers once the cameras are gone and the postcards have been collected.
That is where Wollongong Goals becomes more interesting - and where its claims will eventually be tested.
Two men, two goals
Ask council what success looks like, and general manager Greg Doyle points to reach: a benchmark of 15,000 to 20,000 responses by September 11, with the more important test being who answers, not how many.
Ask Canva chief marketing officer Zach Kitschke the same question - specifically, what’s the one assumption about this pilot he’s genuinely prepared to be proven wrong about - and he doesn’t reach for council’s figures or deflect.
“A personal challenge for me is just how big we can go,” he, who grew up in Wollongong, said.
“I’d love to show that we can hear from as many of those people as possible ... I’d really love to see us hit some crazy big goals, in terms of the numbers that we can get involved.”
Council chasing representation, Canva’s global CMO chasing scale: the project’s own architects proved its premise on themselves first.
Wollongong Goals doesn’t actually ask 220,000 residents to agree on a single priority. It asks them to articulate their own.
The divergence isn’t a failure of the exercise. It’s the point.
The line that matters more than the number
The splashiest thing about Wollongong Goals is the pop-up. The most consequential thing to come out of covering it is a single sentence Kitschke didn’t have to provide.
Put directly to him - “is this a great weekend and then Canva leaves council to work it out?” - he didn’t deflect or reach for a talking point.
“It’s a long-term commitment.”
What makes that worth taking seriously rather than filing it as PR is that he attached a sequence of actions and behaviours to this: the data visualisation staying live on the site, a report published later in the year breaking down what residents actually said, and council and Canva then "playing back" those results to the community as the basis for deciding, together, what's worth tackling next.
“... we’re partnering with council to actually play back what we’ve heard, what we’ve learned, and then that’ll inform the kind of next stage of you know what are the goals that really make sense to tackle together.”
That’s a real process commitment from a senior Canva executive, even though it stops short of a funding or delivery commitment. Council has been explicit that submitting a goal carries no guarantee of either.
The pitch is the product
It’s worth being clear about who actually said it. Kitschke isn’t a marketing exec fronting a regional project: he’s Canva’s global chief marketing and communications officer, employee No. 5 at the company, and has spent 13 years building its marketing organisation from scratch. He’s a four-time entrant on Forbes’ World’s Most Influential CMOs list, most recently credited with pushing Canva past US$3 billion in revenue.
Kitschke, who grew up in Wollongong, went to UOW and even worked at the council, has also been unusually explicit about Canva’s interest in experiential, place-based marketing. After Canva’s 2025 World Tour, which involved hundreds of events across a dozen countries, he described experiential moments as powerful for building community, generating interest and driving press and social attention.
Viewed in that context, Wollongong Goals looks less like a piece of hometown philanthropy sitting outside Canva’s marketing strategy and more like a local application of one.
That doesn’t make the project cynical. It makes the incentives clearer.
Canva gets a chance to build a relationship with a community around something more substantial than a branded event. It gets a civic story with an international angle, a reason for people to engage with its technology, and an example of the kind of community-building experience Kitschke has already identified as valuable to the company.
Doyle, for his part, has been equally candid that Wollongong stands to gain something beyond the data: partnering with “a well-recognised and respected global company with an established reputation for philanthropy,” he said, “puts Wollongong City Council at the forefront of being an innovative local government ... and shines the light on us on an international stage.”
Both partners, in other words, have a reputational interest in this being seen to work - not just a civic one.
Kitschke says council and Canva see themselves as facilitators, not owners: “We’ve had so many non-profits and other organisations from across the city wanting to get involved ... it’s really the community that’s owning it.” Potential collaborators have yet to be named.
What’s next?
For now, Wollongong Goals has done something useful: it has created a mechanism for residents to say what matters to them, without pretending there is one answer for everyone.
The next step is more ambitious. If Canva and council follow through on the process they have outlined - listening, reporting back and bringing the community into the next conversation - the project could have a substantial legacy. It could become a model for what a local government and a global company can do when they use their respective strengths to give a community a bigger voice.
Need to know more
Visit wollongonggoals.org for more information and FAQs.