CASE STUDY
In university marketing, images do more than decorate a campus brochure. They shape perception. The right photo can speak to a prospective student’ s hopes, validate an alum’ s pride or underscore the impact of a major gift.
And yet, until recently, our own department struggled to manage the very visuals we needed most. Our images were fantastic, they just weren’ t workable. Or at least not without friction.
Our image management practices, like many institutions, had evolved piecemeal, resulting in a patchwork system that couldn’ t keep up with growing demands. For years, we stored everything on a local server using an inherited folder structure that made sense to no one. Assets weren’ t necessarily organized by year. Tags were nonexistent. Most new uploads were dropped into existing folders, buried under layers of older content. Designers resorted to reusing their favorite photos, pulling images from their desktops just to stay productive. Some of those images were five or more years old, but at least they could be found.
Meanwhile, our Operations Technology team raised legitimate concerns about server capacity and cost, which highlighted the need for a better long-term solution. They warned us that our unmanaged storage was riddled with duplicates, many of them never used, and that images were beginning to degrade.
At that point, we didn’ t just have a workflow problem. We had a data integrity issue. Our visual assets( one of our most important marketing tools) were becoming liabilities.
The turning point came when our Associate Vice President pushed for a digital asset management( DAM) system. She made the case that it wasn’ t
WE FINALLY HAVE A SYSTEM THAT WORKS
FOR US, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
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