International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW)

Implementing a modern digital asset management (DAM) solution

IFAW was eager to solve their asset management problems, but as a non-profit organization with a small IT staff they lacked the necessary expertise to implement a replacement. They reached out to (OpenText Partner) CyanGate to upgrade their systems to the latest OpenText solution. CyanGate already had plenty of experience with OpenText implementations and IFAW had previously worked with them on other projects, so calling on them was an easy choice.

The charity christened their new instance of OpenText Digital Asset Management “the BOMA,” which stands for “Brand Optimized Media Assets,” but also is the term used for a home where rehabilitated elephants live while they prepare to return to the wild.

Wilson explained what the BOMA has meant to the IFAW, “Now we have robust search features, structured metadata that we can rely on, and reliable, always-on access to our assets, which is a huge value add for our organization.”

The new solution has significantly reduced the time it takes for assets to go from arrival to publication on external channels. Embedded descriptive metadata and technical data are automatically imported, even when staff snap photos on their phones.

Improving permission and usage rights management

In addition to other reasons, that faster turnaround has come from being able to better understand who is providing what content and how it can be used.

For example, at a recent elephant collaring (attaching satellite tracking beacons to better understand elephant movements and keep them safe from human settlements) staff, partners, and external content creators were all on the scene producing assets. All the new content had different usage rights and credits to be considered, which would have been overwhelming without the new system.

Wilson explained, “OpenText was able to let us quickly curate the best content, figure out what it was depicting, make it all available to our staff, and then push it out where it needed to be as efficiently as possible. We're talking 500 assets that we were able to quickly condense, describe, and push out to teams in development, communications, and marketing to talk about the work that we were able to do on the ground and show the story of the collaring of this herd of elephants.”

She continued, “You really can't tell that story without the visuals. Seeing elephants get back up on their feet is so incredible. The DAM helps us tell that story in a more streamlined way. It's really special for us.”

Increasing collaboration between teams across the globe

Assets need to be useful regardless of where they are gathered and where they are needed.

“Communication is so key to mobilizing global support for our initiatives,” Wilson explained. “We have a lot of regional teams that need central access to information so that they can push it out to regional markets depending on which countries may be impacted by a story, who may be interested in the story, which donors may find something relevant.”

OpenText Digital Asset Management has made it much easier to coordinate a worldwide effort.

Wilson said, "We have seen enhanced collaboration within the system, and I've received a lot of feedback that users like the upgraded UI." She continued, "Our fieldwork has definitely improved thanks to the ability to organize assets more efficiently and the structured metadata controls, which allow us to quickly see improvements, such as better ranger housing in different national parks. We can see the before and after of what it looked like. We can see how populations are benefiting from the work that we're doing by the harvesting of their gardens and field work.”

Sharing assets with donors as soon as possible—sometimes the same day as the event—lets them see the impact their support is having on the ground.