Who is Knute Nelson? 

Knute Nelson is a non-profit organization with a vision to provide innovative solutions that empower individuals to thrive; serving over 8000 clients throughout their continuum of care in 2021. Their mission as an organization is to enrich the lives of everyone they serve, and foster customer-focused, holistic, and inclusive experiences to meet their customers’ needs.

Before implementing MediaValet, Knute Nelson used a private server to store all their assets and ensure the privacy and security of their customers. Here are a few areas where they experienced challenges that lead them to their search for a DAM:

As Knute Nelson began to grow as an organization, challenges began to add up just as fast. They were finding Band-Aid fixes that only led to more challenges down the line, and quickly grew out of their to-do list as a very small team. This eventually led them to realize they were in need of a true project management system.

After taking a closer look at all their assets, Knute Nelson realized they didn’t need to share any documents with personal health information. Instead, they simply wanted to share their product and service collateral and needed a secure, user-friendly, single source of truth to do just that: digital asset management.

As Knute Nelson looked for an additional solution, a significant selling point for MediaValet was the option to integrate with Wrike.

As soon as an asset is approved through the production process, Knute Nelson can select their document in Wrike, and it will upload directly into MediaValet without ever leaving the application. Instead of traditionally downloading an asset, saving it temporarily to the desktop, and having to re-upload it to multiple locations for others to access, this time-consuming process is made easy with the Wrike and MediaValet Connector.

The three main benefits Knute Nelson experienced when connecting Wrike and MediaValet include:

Wrike and DAM: Better Together

With their Wrike and MediaValet integration, Knute Nelson is able to easily find the assets they need, improve collaboration with their end users, and publish and track their assets with ease by enabling users to publish approved assets to MediaValet directly within their Wrike tasks.

Who is Art Bridges? 

Art Bridges Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded by Alice Walton in 2017, dedicated to expanding access to American art across the United States. Based in Bentonville, Arkansas, it partners with museums and cultural institutions to share artworks through traveling exhibitions, collection loans, and community programming—especially in underserved areas. Its mission is to make American art more accessible, engaging, and inclusive for all.

Colin Carmichael

Director of Web Operations, Art Bridges

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As a recently established nonprofit foundation, Art Bridges partners with museums and art organizations to make American art available to communities across the United States. When we had the opportunity to interview Colin Carmichael, the Director of Web Operations at Art Bridges, we were thrilled to learn about the role MediaValet has played in enabling them to host events and share information with event managers.

This interview shares Art Bridges’ journey with implementing MediaValet and explains how MediaValet’s various features have helped Art Bridges transform the way they facilitate access to art across the United States.

To start us off, can you please let us know more about the Art Bridges Foundation and yourself?

“I am the Director of Web Operations for Art Bridges, responsible for our web presence and all our related technologies. The Art Bridges Foundation is a nonprofit arts foundation located in Bentonville, Arkansas. Our mission is to expand access to American art across the United States – especially in areas where there’s currently limited or zero access to art. We do this by organizing and traveling exhibitions to our 167 partner museums of all sizes — everybody from the Museum of Modern Art and The Met in New York to small regional museums, like The Museum Broken Arrow in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

We have a collection of almost 100 artworks available for long-term loans to our partners and we provide financial and strategic support for exhibitions, loans, and collection sharing. Our efforts include trying to get artwork out of storage and on the road, so it can be seen by people who normally don’t have access to art. Additionally, we support programming, audience engagement and evaluation work around those exhibitions and loans.”

What was your initial goal with implementing a DAM?

“When I first got to Art Bridges, we were a team of six working on a shared drive where all our assets were stored by individuals, usually with only themselves in mind. So, the way we organized assets wasn’t quite right, and it was difficult to find and share assets (we were sharing mostly through email). My initial focus was to find a platform that allowed us to effectively store, find and share all our photo, audio, and video assets. MediaValet has been a huge help with that. The platform is extremely efficient, making our assets very easy to find and share.

Our ultimate goal is to have MediaValet act as our hub but have everyone access MediaValet from a connected platform so that no one actually touches the library itself.”

How are you using MediaValet today? Is there anything that you can do now that you couldn’t before?

“In our initial rollout, the exhibitions team immediately saw a use case for Branded Portals to make it easier for us to distribute information around our exhibitions to our partners. What was previously sent via email can now be posted into Branded Portals, allowing our users to easily access and download them from anywhere they can get an Internet connection.

We’re also able to password protect assets and restrict downloads, when necessary, as we have some restrictions on artwork. Sometimes artwork is ‘Rights Managed’, so we can’t allow them to be downloaded. We are also able to expire each Branded Portal to ensure everything is kept current, clean, and archived, which has been a huge improvement over our previous manual method. Our current MediaValet platform has 3500 files and growing, and we’ve expanded to a team of 23 now from that initial six in about a year and a half.

Another thing that is made much easier with MediaValet has been file organization. Since we are now able to share files within the system, we can ensure that there is one correct file for each asset, eliminating duplicates and protecting our files in one centralized location. We use MediaValet as our sole source of information and that’s helped to keep things clean.

We’re also using MediaValet with our project management tool, Wrike. Since the two are connected, it makes it easy for our project managers to find and share assets through Wrike, instead of needing direct access to our MediaValet library.”

Can you share a bit more about your integration with Wrike and how that works?

“MediaValet and Wrike have an out-of-the-box connector that’s simple to set up. When we were looking for a project management system, we were already using MediaValet, so we really liked Wrike’s capabilities and ability to integrate seamlessly with MediaValet. We are able to push and pull files directly to and from MediaValet from within Wrike and use the integration to improve our process for receiving files from our partners.

When our museum partners create assets, we want to make sure that we get a copy of them and that we’re able to archive the assets in MediaValet. To make sure of this, we have created a custom-built form in Wrike and hosted it on our website, so that our partner museums can send files to us through the form. When the form is completed by our partners, we are then tagged with a notification that allows our project managers to go into Wrike to review and approve assets before saving them directly to MediaValet.”

You’ve also implemented an integration with WordPress. Can you tell us more about that?

“MediaValet works with our WordPress CMS by acting as one central location where all necessary assets are stored. For example, when beginning a task, I first pick out all the files that we’re going to use, including any photos and videos, and add them into our MediaValet library. Then, from within WordPress, we pull the assets to the WordPress library. We make sure that our assets are not uploaded directly into WordPress in order to ensure that we have one correct file and that assets are not duplicated.”

How has your DAM facilitated the smooth coordination of art exhibitions throughout the United States?

“When we organize exhibitions, they typically have a lot of supplemental information that travels with them. This could include:

Since there is a wealth of information that travels with the exhibitions, the process has been made easier by sharing it all through Branded Portals. It simplifies the process and makes it easy for our partners to get online to download what they need and find it again if they need to. That’s been a huge success and we’ve had several partners share how much they like Branded Portals. It has worked really well for us.”

What did onboarding look like at Art Bridges Foundation?

“At the very beginning, I created a road map and tried to take meaningful steps towards the overall goal, knowing that I couldn’t do everything on day one. I thought of our exhibitions team as a pilot to let people see what was possible.

I started by pulling everything in from our shared drive into MediaValet and tagging assets with basic information. While I was doing so, I was thinking about actionable ways that I could increase user adoption of the DAM by taking notice of inefficiencies and where people were wasting time.

One of the first things I did when onboarding MediaValet was inform everyone about Branded Portals, explaining that it was a much more efficient way for us to share information, as opposed to what we were doing before. I also created a governance document that outlined the purpose of the DAM, giving general guidance to our staff, answering questions like:

I looked at the core focus, who it serves, and explained the type of files we were going to house in the DAM. Our team is pretty small, so there wasn’t a lot of difficulty with change management. I did ensure that everyone knew about MediaValet’s unlimited training to ensure everyone knew how to use the platform well.”

Can you share how you’ve set up your taxonomy?

“I’ve left that up to our individual teams. The exhibitions group, for example, has created a category for each partner. Within that category, they have a repeatable folder structure where they put in all the different information that is required for an exhibition, and it has worked well for them.

Since the exhibitions group has seen such success using Branded Portals, our Collections team, in turn, started creating their own Branded Portals for each of our objects, within the last couple weeks. There is a lot of extended information around our objects and most of it is educational, but there’s also all kinds of requirements depending on the age and frailty of our objects that determine how they can travel. Branded Portals have been helpful in keeping everything organized.”

What advice would you give to others going through a similar journey?

“When looking at current processes for sharing things externally, I would note that the ability to do so with Branded Portals is really simple. You can use lightboxes for logged in users, of course, but for external users, Branded Portals are huge.

Also, in terms of looking for opportunities to integrate with other systems, we have Wrike, WordPress, and we’re looking at Office 365 as a full rollout shortly and MediaValet has made the integration process seamless.”

What is next for Art Bridges and MediaValet?

“We are getting ready to start a discovery process for our new website. Our current website is well focused on who Art Bridges is and what we do, but we really need to create a website that makes it easier for our partners to work with us and really facilitates that interaction. We’re also creating a new intranet, so through both of those, we’re going to look for ways to integrate MediaValet and make it easy to move our assets from MediaValet into these systems.

Additionally, we’re getting ready to fully launch on Office 365, so I think there will be quite a few people that are going to use MediaValet as their document storage. Those are the main things that we have coming up but we’re always looking for new ways to use technology to work smarter and MediaValet has been a huge help and a great partner in building that out.”

Who is Community Associations Institute? 

Community Associations Institute (CAI) is a nonprofit organization that provides education and resources to community association professionals and homeowners. They faced challenges in managing their digital assets, which were scattered across various platforms, leading to inefficiencies and difficulties in locating and sharing content.

Cori Canady

Creative Director , Community Associations Institute (CAI)

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How does a two-person graphic design team ensure a remote workforce, along with 64 community chapters spread across several countries, have access to the content they need to power stronger communities? This is the question we had for Cori Canady, Creative Director at Community Associations Institute (CAI).

In addition to creating new, engaging brand content, Cori was spending up to 15 hours per week responding to asset requests from other departments. Without the right technology in place to support operations, it was becoming near impossible to respond to the growing needs of her organization and chapters.

This interview shares Cori’s journey in making the decision to invest in a DAM, advocating for its use within the organization and the “aha” moments she’s experienced since implementing MediaValet.

To start us off, can you tell us a bit about Community Associations Institute?

“CAI, which stands for Community Associations Institute is a non-profit organization that was founded almost 50 years ago to address the growing housing model, primarily in the U.S. (but we have members around the world).

We address the common interest, home ownership model where you purchase a home in a community, condominium or co-op, and pay monthly assessments to an association that then provides services to the homeowners. CAI’s members range from volunteers to professional community associations. Our goal is to provide them with education, ongoing certifications and designations, as well as an opportunity for people to network together throughout the year.”

Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background, and what you do at CAI?

“As a graphic designer, I’ve been working in the industry for a long time – 30 years actually. I came out of school when things were mostly print-based.

Through my career, I’ve worked on branding all kinds of marketing, communications, collateral and publications. I’ve seen the industry develop from one that was traditionally focused on print work, to one that’s taking on a surge of cross-channel digital work – in addition to what’s already being done in print.

With CAI I’m actually on my second tenure. I was with CAI for four years right out of school, then I left and went to work for a marketing communications agency. I came back several years later to take advantage of some of the expertise that I gained from being away. Now, I’ve been back for close to 18 years.

I have one other full-time staff person, who produces all our video and animated content. The two of us together kind of fill in the gaps. Then I have freelancers, who I work with from time-to-time on different things I’m managing.”

How did the team operate and communicate before using MediaValet? What were the major pain points?

“For years we’ve had an internal Windows server, where assets were stored in folders. People would just save files wherever they wanted to, so we had a number of duplicates. I was getting constant emails or phone calls: “Could you pull together everything we have on this and put it in this folder for me?” Then I had to drop what I was doing and go assemble all these files, knowing that I was probably making duplicates, or even triplicates – all because they didn’t have a way to easily find everything. I would say I spent anywhere from three to six hours per week on these types of requests, depending on what we had going on as an organization. If we were getting ready for a big event that probably would have jumped up to probably 12-15 hours.

We had the opportunity to work with a leading visual content supplier to generate a library of royalty-free images on behalf of our chapters. As part of that process, they offered us access to a “Lite DAM” that we decided to try out.

While the idea behind it was really compelling, the execution of the library was really cumbersome. It was a challenge for us to keep things organized and we had a hard time training our chapters on it. We figured out quickly that this specific product wasn’t for us, but we needed to find something similar. In 2018, I met the MediaValet team at AdobeMax and immediately knew this was what we needed.”

What made you select MediaValet over alternative options?

“For me, it really came down to knowing that in order to get people to adopt it, it needed to be very seamless and easy. What really enticed me was the Office 365 connector – how easy it would be to use. I felt like some of the biggest requests I was getting were from people putting together PowerPoint presentations. It was such a hassle for me to assemble everything and then sometimes they’d have to come back and say: “This is too big; can you size it down?” I could see the excitement on their faces when they saw how the Office 365 connector works. I didn’t really find that kind of ease of everyday use in the research that I did.”

How did you get internal buy-in to implement MediaValet?

“It was an easy sell – it costs way less, does way more, everybody can access it, and it’s easy to use. Those were all things that really helped me get it sold internally. Once we got people on board, I started the process by setting up a demo with my direct report and we went all the way through it to make sure it was a good fit.

Then, I began building support with little groups of staff – just people that I thought would be helpful to get on board and say, “Look you don’t have to call me and ask where things are anymore. We can just build MediaValet the way we need it”. Every group that I showed it to was onboard, so once we got the ball rolling everybody was already up-to-speed and excited. It’s really resolved a lot of the headaches we were experiencing.”

Can you describe the team that’s using MediaValet today?

“We actually have a really interesting model. We have a headquarters office, but right now we’re all working from home (it’s been amazing to have MediaValet in place with everyone working from different places). Then, we have about 60 people across 64 chapters around the world.

Those individual chapters function as their own local connection for CAI, so they provide some of the same local programming opportunities for people to network with people that live there. We’ve struggled for years with how we can support those chapters. We don’t have the bandwidth at the national level to create marketing collateral for them, but we’ve tried very hard to find ways that we could help equip them with some things that they need.”

How are you using MediaValet today? How does it help you enable your 64 charters?

“We don’t open licensed photography up to the chapters, but we’ve made everything else available. We have some chapters that are very eager to follow the brand, some who want to do what we’re doing, and others who just don’t have a lot of resources. From a brand management perspective, we really needed to get everything where everyone can access it.

There’s a logo system that CAI is the head of, including a specific version of the logo for each individual chapter. As you can imagine, with print files for each chapter, just the logo files alone are a huge section of our storage within MediaValet. In the past we’ve manually provided them with graphics, content and logos that would help them promote national activities or events that the headquarters was spearheading. Now, this is seamless with MediaValet.

We’ve really started to try to find ways in the most recent year or two to give them more content that’s not specific to the national organization, that they can use at any time. For example, we might create something that is more topical in nature, like parking issues around the holidays or when to tell people to take their holiday lights down.

I really wanted them to feel empowered to come up with some new things on their own, as well. That’s hard to quantify and put any kind of number on it, but I feel like in the end it’s going to help us to have a stronger connection across the chapters and enable consistency.“

What kind of assets are you primarily storing?

“We mostly store images and graphics at this point, such as ones we’ve created for social media or banner ads. We also use MediaValet for some print work and PowerPoints that we’ve created for chapters to use.

We have a pretty large number of members who also sponsor things with us, such as certain events or activities, so we have a good collection of all of their logos. It’s made it very easy for us to be sure we’re only using the current logo, regardless of if they’ve gone through a rebranding. If someone sends us a new one, we just update it in MediaValet and we don’t have to worry about it again.”

Is there anything specific that you can do now that you couldn’t before?

“When we create a suite of graphics, some of them go into an email server, some go on social media, some might go on the website – different people are responsible for handling these things. I was really trying to get away from emailing attachments to all of those people. Now, I’ve been working hard to ensure completed graphics are added to MediaValet right away. Then, I just need to notify users that all the assets are there. I sometimes send a link to the gallery, just because that’s an easy way to access it, as well. But I’m really trying to reiterate “go to MediaValet”. Let that be their first source.

Has MediaValet provided any unexpected outcomes?

“We actually had a situation pop up this week. In our organization governance, we have three leadership councils. One of the councils offers an online course for service providers but had concerns about how to promote it. Our staff liaison reached out to several of us to assemble what we have to promote this course. What was so awesome is I didn’t even have to say it – someone else said, “Well, I just created a folder in MediaValet, let’s just put everything there”.

Then, when our staff liaison shared that she didn’t want the chapters to have access to this while we’re still working on it, I explained that we could just hide the category from that user group until we were ready to reveal it. She was so thrilled that we could do that!”

What’s the next step for you?

“There are some people who don’t use it every day, and I want to find ways to get them using MediaValet more frequently and get additional value. I’m also trying to take advantage of the webinars when they’re happening to stay up to date with the new features that are coming. That’s one of the things I like about the platform – I feel like you guys are always looking at ways to improve and bring new things to light.”

Is there any advice that you could give to someone looking to implement a DAM?

“It can be overwhelming. One of the things that I found very, very helpful with MediaValet’s onboarding process is that the steps were broken down. There’s an old expression: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Keep your eyes on the end goal and work through it, step by step.

I definitely found that once we had the basic framework in place and the system launched, it was very adaptable. We try to use the MediaValet recommended best practices and then adapt as we go.

So, my biggest advice would be just not to get daunted by the process and that it’s worth the investment and time because it will pay off in the end. We’re still seeing the payoff from MediaValet and we’ll continue to see more as we learn new ways to use it.”

The last question is just for fun: What’s your favourite movie and why?

“This is a hard question, believe it or not, so I have two answers for you:

My son is 18 and he’s about to graduate from high school and he is planning to study film in college. So, right now my favorite movie is whichever one I’m watching with him. If this were a normal time I probably wouldn’t see him very much this year – he’d be really busy and doing things out of the house. I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to just spend some time with him.

The other is the movie I will always stop and watch, even if I’ve seen it a million times – which is The Wedding Singer with Adam Sandler. I love that movie! It’s silly and just a fun one to watch over and over.”