How one marketing team boosts their outreach with DAM

Nonprofit marketing and creative teams often must work with limited time, staff and funding, making it all the more necessary to streamline workflows so that teams work smoothly together and save time. Jenny Lee, the creative director of Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF), joined us to host a webinar about nonprofit marketing challenges and how digital asset management (DAM) can help.

How OMRF uses dam to overcome nonprofit marketing hurdles

OMRF is a 73-year-old nonprofit organization that supports the research of life-threatening diseases. Jenny Lee, OMRF’s creative director, has transformed the organization’s public affairs and outreach work by using Canto to centralize, organize and share visual assets.

Organized for Speed!

As a seven-decades-old organization, OMRF has thousands and thousands of old photos. Keeping these photos organized and easily findable means quicker turnaround and more efficient work.

“We have a big 75th anniversary coming up, so we’ll need to be able to get to our older assets to tell our story. Secondly, we post daily with social media so we need to find specific assets really quickly. We kill on Throwback Thursday because we have our things organized. We know where they are, what they are, and we’re able to get to them quickly,” says Jenny.

Cloud-based collaboration

Because Canto hosts all visual assets in the cloud, anyone can access anything remotely as long as they have an internet connection. Jenny shared an example of how she used Canto to collaborate with a team member over a holiday – without leaving her spot on the beach.

“On Saturday of Labor Day weekend, I was sitting in my beach chair when I found out that Valerie Harper Rhoda had passed away. She had visited OMRF in 1998,” says Jenny.

“From my beach chair, I was able to locate her photo and the press release from her visit in our Canto archive. I sent it off to my writing partner, who then wrote up a tribute. We got it posted within an hour of getting the news – on a Saturday with nobody in the office. That’s why cloud based is so great for us.”

Streamlining media relations

Media outreach is absolutely crucial for OMRF to get their name and mission in front of donors and the public. In the past, Jenny and her team would have to send outrageously large email attachments full of images and brand assets, which would blow out their email storage. Now, it’s as simple as sending a Canto link, which speeds up their work and strengthens relationships with journalists.

“We send out about 100 press releases a year. We send our media contacts a Canto collection link with the appropriate photos, cut lines and download instructions,” says Jenny.

“We try to try to make it as painless as possible for the reporters so that it’ll be really easy for them to write the story.”

Controlling the brand

Jenny emphasizes that keeping OMRF’s brand consistent and recognizable helps establish trust with donors.

“It’s important for donors to know just from looking at our brand that this is the organization they’ve been contributing to for 50 years, and that it’s an organization they trust,” says Jenny.

Putting everything in a Canto Style Guide makes it easy for the team to share their brand assets and guidelines, such as logos, brand colors and fonts, via a link. That way, everyone on the team can find exactly what they need in one place.

Watch the recorded webinar!

 

Read more about how OMRF uses Canto here.