The International Fund for Animal Welfare is a global non-profit helping animals and people thrive together. Focused on animal rescue, rehabilitation, and release as well as habitat protection and restoration, they operate in over 40 countries.

How the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) uses DAM to protect wildlife and streamline global conservation efforts.

Years of service:

55+
Animals rescued:

275,000+
New annual assets:

15,000+
DAM users:

90

Summary

Challenges

Outdated media library caused unreliable metadata, search, and customer support.
Inefficient workarounds wasted limited staff resources.

Solution

Implemented a modern digital asset management (DAM) solution.
Improved permission and usage rights management.
Increased collaboration between teams across the globe.

Results

Improved user trust and satisfaction
Increased efficiency to focus on the mission
Strengthened user support

Challenges

Outdated media library caused unreliable metadata, search, and customer support
Limited staff resources wasted time on inefficient operations and unsanctioned workarounds

As a non-profit working with animals around the world, IFAW has to be able to collect and distribute rich media like photos and videos. These digital assets are not only core to tracking the work they do around the world, they’re also key to showing their progress and the animals they serve, to donors, partners, governments, and the media. People need to be able to see the need and the results.

“Storytelling is so essential to helping us achieve our success in wildlife rescue and conservation. It is what connects people to the mission,” Grace Wilson, director of content marketing for IFAW explained.

Working with wildlife in over forty countries, the organization must be able to collect, organize, and use content submitted from a huge variety of exotic (and not so exotic) locales and remote areas. Once these assets come in, they need to be easily accessible to staff for use around the world, making a single, central repository crucial.

Wilson described the trouble they had with their previous solution, “We used to be using an older media library software that was extremely outdated. Users were extremely frustrated with the customer support they were getting, with the number of assets in the system, the unreliability of the metadata, and the problems they had with the search function.”

Internal workarounds were common. Some departments even decided it was more efficient to store assets in individual folder structures without metadata.

A fast turnaround with media is critical to the IFAW’s work, as Wilson explained, “We have a lot of timely initiatives, such as reporting on new births of North Atlantic right whales, a critically endangered species of which there are only around 350 left in the world. Without the ability to get new assets up quickly and shared with our entire global team to tell stories like the one about the right whale or disaster response work across the world, we wouldn't be able to engage our supporters and get the much needed funding for that work.”

The number of incoming rich media assets per year soared to over 15,000, completely overwhelming the existing system. The IFAW needed a replacement solution that was reliable, more efficient, and adaptable to worldwide access, fluctuating staff, and asset volume.

A photographer taking pictures of penguins on a beach

OpenText Digital Asset Management is a scalable and robust solution that offers us the structured metadata and granular permissions that we need at IFAW to manage an ever-growing firehose of assets with the extremely complex permissions.

Grace Wilson
Director of Content Marketing, IFAW

Solution

To overhaul how it handled thousands of incoming assets from around the world, IFAW deployed OpenText™ Digital Asset Management, a powerful, innovative, and highly scalable solution to manage rich media content.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Manage marketing, branding, commerce, broadcast, heritage, security, and training content through creation, distribution, and retirement

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.

A person having their picture taken with a koala

OpenText also provides amazing customer support and has an incredible reputation, which really sealed the deal for us as something that we felt comfortable investing in as an organization.

Grace Wilson
Director of Content Marketing, IFAW

Results

IFAW is now equipped to handle the more than 15,000 new assets they receive annually in an efficient manner, while new AI functionality holds the promise of making their small staff even more effective.

Improved user trust and satisfaction

Wilson described the response to the new solution, “Employees are not going rogue anymore. I hear things from employees like ‘we love the BOMA,’ which I basically consider a standing ovation.”

The marketing team has been a particularly strong adopter, recognizing how much easier it makes managing permissions and usage rights across markets, audiences, and partners.

Increased efficiency to focus on the mission

With OpenText Digital Asset Management, IFAW has been able to improve the usability and discoverability of assets. Related assets can be linked within the system, and collections saved for specific reuse on different channels later.

Wilson added, “We’re looking at using AI to automate a lot of our tedious tasks so that our staff can focus more on the work on the ground, on relationships with our supporters and donors, helping animals, and on the creative work that our team does.”

Strengthened user support

The new digital asset management system is not only more powerful, it’s much more reliable.

Wilson described the support they’ve received, “OpenText is a reliable partner that has been there when we've needed them. On the rare occasions that I have needed customer support, or when I have had a technical question about what I'm able to do, I have always been impressed with the response that I've received. The uptime has been amazing as well for marketing and communications across the world.”

Wilson concluded, “For OpenText to be able to provide something that I can trust so I can sleep well at night makes a really big difference for all of us.”