How Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation Uses Canto

Website:

Company:

Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation

Headquarters:

Oklahoma City, OK

Industry:

Nonprofit, Healthcare

The nonprofit needed to manage their growing, decades-old archive of imagery and an easy way to share photos with press to support fundraising.

What used to take days now takes minutes, meaning the team can work faster and reach more donors in less time.

For many people faced with treatment-resistant, life-threatening diseases, the clinical trials at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) are their last hope. OMRF is a nonprofit organization that conducts research focused on the treatment and curing of diseases such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

Jenny Lee, OMRF’s Creative Director, leads the creative team and oversees the organization’s image and brand communications with the bottom line of generating donations to fund research that may one day save lives. She is armed with OMRF’s expansive digital asset library, collected over its 74-year-old history – but making the most of their library required an updated way to organize, search, and share these photos and videos.

Goal: Cloud-Based DAM to Unlock Team Flow

For the past five years, OMRF used Extensis Portfolio to manage their archives and digital asset library. Although the system was working, it was slowing the team down, not helping them work faster or more efficiently as they grew. Jenny knew that OMRF needed a fast, cloud-based DAM system that could help the public affairs team ramp up their media relations efforts quickly.

Enter Canto: Democratizing Digital Asset Management

OMRF chose Canto because its cloud-based platform enabled collaboration, and it was the best DAM solution that met the organization’s needs at a nonprofit-friendly price point.

In Jenny’s words, “Digital asset management should be as easy as making a Facebook album,” and Canto’s intuitive, user-friendly interface makes that a reality. Jenny estimates that she is able to train new users in just 30 minutes. By flattening the user group and eliminating bottlenecks for accessing assets, Jenny has democratized DAM for her team.

The public affairs team was able to transform their media outreach workflow by using Canto portals and collections. When Jenny started at OMRF, the team would distribute assets to media via email attachments; within two weeks on the job, she had blown out her email storage. Today, she can simply direct media partners to a Canto portal or pull together an ad hoc Canto collection, where they can find and download the assets they need on-demand.

Canto’s recent facial recognition rollout has also aided the team by automatically tagging known individuals throughout OMRF’s historical archives. Combined with Canto’s layered search and filter capabilities, this makes it easy for the team to find photos of certain people from a specific time period – a common ask that will no doubt increase leading up to the nonprofit’s 75th anniversary. (Jenny is also happy to point out a side bonus: “We kill on Throwback Thursday.”)

Canto has transformed the way we do business – what used to take us days now literally takes minutes.

Jenny Lee – Creative Director

Results: “Canto Has Been Transformative”

Jenny’s end goal is to drive more contributions so that OMRF can continue adding to the body of knowledge around life-threatening diseases. Her team achieves this goal by getting OMRF in front of donors as much as possible through the media.

“The thing about our donors is that generally they’re a little bit older so they still read the newspaper. The more times we can get in the news and in front of them, the better,” said Jenny.

For a typical media outreach campaign, OMRF’s media coordinator may push a press release to as many as 300 media outlets at a time. Canto helps them save time throughout this process – ultimately enabling the team to reach out to more media outlets, faster.

“Canto has transformed the way we do business – what used to take us days now literally takes minutes,” said Jenny.

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