As the number of charitable organizations and causes they support continue to grow, the nonprofit sector is becoming more competitive and complex year after year. With each organization striving to increase the impact of their investments, attract new donors and recruit volunteers, outreach strategies are becoming more sophisticated and engaging—with a heavy emphasis on digital.

Moreover, as a nonprofit organization, maintaining a significant digital presence is now more crucial than ever to effectively drive funding and highlight the importance of its cause. Doing this well requires a strong toolbelt of compelling images, videos, and content to help potential donors connect with the brand. Since content is only valuable if it can be found and used, to make the most of it, it's important to properly manage it. For this reason, many nonprofit organizations have begun looking into a digital asset management (DAM) solution.

What is a DAM?

Digital asset management (DAM) systems have emerged as a solution for nonprofit organizations, allowing them to better manage and distribute their content and establish a solid foundation for their long-term digital strategy. A DAM system not only helps nonprofit organizations manage, organize, share, and distribute their digital assets from within one central library — it improves productivity while increasing the ROI of all content produced.

Most nonprofit organizations that do not have a DAM in place struggle with these similar issues:

• Discoverability: Organizations are storing marketing material in multiple locations, making it extremely difficult to find what they need,
• Accessibility: accessing and finding assets can be cumbersome and lengthy,
• Workflow: The process of finding assets is taking up way too much time, which is slowing down projects as well as the execution of outreach campaigns, and
• Security: They don’t feel their assets are truly secure.

Benefits of DAM for Nonprofit

All the common pain points for nonprofit organizations can be solved with the right DAM in place, on top of the several additional benefits it has to offer. The top 4 benefits organizations gain from implementing a DAM include being able to:

1. Better leverage your brand,
2. Empower your affiliates and drive collaboration,
3. Increase the impact of your content, and
4. Preserve your legacy.

Let’s dive into each benefit in more detail.

1. Better Leverage Your Brand

Maintaining a strong brand and ensuring everyone is using consistent messaging can be challenging when multiple departments and affiliates are all creating marketing collateral for various campaigns. A DAM ensures that all users are equipped with marketing materials that are on-brand and up to date, drawing from one central library. This allows your organization to ensure consistent branding as all assets become visually aligned with a DAM—no more outdated logos!

2. Empower Your Affiliates and Drive Collaboration

With a DAM, users can easily find, download, and share approved work-in-progress and finalized assets. Additionally, marketing material and content will be readily available when anyone is organizing events, launching campaigns or running educational initiatives. Availability in the cloud also ensures that even users in the most remote areas, with no access to IT, can easily access those resources or upload their own materials.

3. Increase the Impact of Your Content

Whether it's creating new marketing collateral for donor campaigns, fundraiser events or recruitment material, a DAM ensures you’re getting the most from your marketing materials and the money spent creating them. By having a library that is organized and easily accessible, your content’s lifespan gets extended and maximizes its value. Additionally, you can organize marketing content by campaign name, region, years, etc., allowing users anywhere to easily find and re-use visuals, content, and media.

4. Preserve Your Legacy

A DAM allows nonprofit organizations to maintain and preserve their growing library of fundraising collateral and historic content, enabling it to be used for future initiatives, educational events, anniversary marketing campaigns and more. These assets help preserve the memories that are important for connecting with donors and engaging volunteers.

The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI)

JGI came to MediaValet with the challenge of preserving Dr. Jane Goodall’s 60-year legacy and distributing marketing imagery to various global chapters and stakeholders. The advanced functionality allowed them to extend the use of the DAM to areas they hadn’t even dreamt of—scientific research. The Jane Goodall Institute’s top three benefits from using a DAM include:

1. Marketing Material Distribution: Storing all assets used for storytelling purposes—the photos and videos from years of JGI initiatives.
2. Scientific Research Distribution: Using the platform to facilitate scientific research and discovery—the 60 years of handwritten notes, field videos, etc., used to help researchers and scientists around the world understand great apes.
3. Organizing Precious Archival Assets: Creating a digital home for the ongoing archiving of Jane’s global outreach past and present. A place where they gather and transcribe Jane’s digital recordings from throughout the years, making them easily searchable and shareable.

Read the Jane Goodall Institute’s DAM Story, here.

Get Ahead with DAM

A DAM helps nonprofits manage their marketing collateral, preserve their brand history, and improve collaboration with both staff and affiliates. For more details on how MediaValet supports organizations in the nonprofit sector, check out DAM for Nonprofits, here.

This blog post was originally posted in February 2019 and has been updated.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.