 Welcome, everyone. My name is Patty DeBeau. I am the president of Parsons TKO, hosting this webinar. I am thankful to see you all here today and look forward to a really great conversation about digital asset management. I'm joined by my colleague Adam Good here, who's a senior strategist with us at Parsons TKO. A few of my other colleagues sprinkled throughout. In particular, we've got Andrea Bishop with us today, who is our admin for the meeting. So if you have any issues, technical issues, or any other questions about the topic through the session, please don't hesitate to put it in the chat for the Zoom. And just note that we are recording this webinar, so we will be distributing this to everyone afterwards. And we will ask we're going to split the session today a little bit between some presentation up front, and then we've got about half the time scheduled for Q&A. So we will just ask if you've got questions to please put them in the chat, and we'll be keeping track and documenting those so that we will come back to them once we get through the initial part of the webinar. Before we get rolling, I did just want to give you all a quick overview of who we are at Parsons TKO and what it is that we do. Obviously, asset management is a piece of it, but we are a consulting firm that works primarily with mission-driven organizations and nonprofits. And the way we think about what we do is our philosophy of what we call engagement architecture. Engagement architecture is the way we think about the work we do, the work our clients do, and a holistic methodology for approaching your audience outreach. It is not just marketing, it is not just development, it is not just communications, it is all of those things and more. And so we've got a little graphic there on the side that shows you the holistic way we think about it. Engagement architecture is not only the tools and technologies of how you do outreach to your audiences, and we'll be talking a bit about that today, asset management platforms in particular, but also what processes and governance you have around that, what people and staffing you have, what sort of goals or strategy you have in place, and how does all of that come together to provide great audience experiences, what data are you capturing around it so you can learn and iterate. And so it is something we love to talk about. We'd be happy to talk to any of you about it more if you have questions about how we approach the work we do. I thought that might just be some helpful framing for the topic we have at hands today. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Adam to kick us off for the main part of our webinar. Excellent. Thanks Patty, and thanks everyone for joining us. So today we're really excited to be talking about improving digital file management in the remote age or paraphrasing that a little bit. It's about damn time. Damn, of course, standing for digital asset management, which is basically how you are able to manage your digital assets collectively and cohesively throughout your organization so you can implement more effective communications and engagement with your audiences. I was really, I have been really excited to give this talk primarily because I get to say damn pretty much every slide. So I don't know if we'll have an official running tally of how many times I say that, but for those of you watching from home, if you want to keep track, it'll be a lot. And we'll have a lot of puns. We'll have a good time along the way. So what's the damn idea? What is damn? Why are we here? What promise does damn hold out for us? So I said that there would be puns. I'm going to just get some of them out of the way. It's not a damn like this, you know, where you're kind of stopping things up and just collecting a big pool that sort of sits there. It's not a damn like this where you have a fire and brimstone preacher yelling at people that they need to change their ways. You see some people in the front audience looking kind of scared like maybe they've put their files in the wrong places or something. But it's not that. It's also not the best damn root beer. This is not a product placement. We weren't, you know, we're not sponsored by by this company. I do highly recommend this. If you like hard root beers, it is pretty damn good. So what we are talking about is the ability to organize your assets so they can easily be found and used throughout your organization. And really what it comes down to, and the reason we put ability first is that is this interrelated connection of the technologies you use, but the people who use them in the processes that you have in place so that they can be used effectively. And found and used, I will really want to emphasize as well, because this isn't just kind of archiving all of your documents and creating a library that just sort of sits there until you need something. Damn is really about empowering you to find the materials you're looking for and use them for whatever you need to create in order to engage with your audiences or engage with your stakeholders. You know, I know, they're probably most people on this on this call have had a time when they've said, Oh, I really need a picture of this for an annual report. Or I need a, you know, I need a video that I think we produced three years ago and I want to share it with a thunder. Damn allows you to find those things more effectively and easily so that you can communicate out. So chances are some of you may have a dam in place already an official digital asset management platform. But if you're like most organizations, you probably have a lot of damning going on around the organization that's very ad hoc. So if you have files in your email, like I don't know how many emails I have that like have an attachment that I've forgotten to download to a solid location. So I have files in my emails, you know, maybe you have stuff in a Dropbox, maybe you your organization has a Google Drive and SharePoint, and the mysterious Q drive that most organizations have, which is a drive that sort of it's exists somewhere in space and time, and sort of sucks up files, and they're very hard to find. You know, maybe you do have something official like binder or another dedicated platform. And that's just in the, you know, in the distributed online sense, you know, you probably also have random folders and files on an interns desk, which they might not even be able to get to now, because of remote working. And you probably have, you know, hard drives from five or six years ago, that maybe have some really good event footage of the organization's leadership, but you're not sure. So this is just really to say that most organizations have assets. And I'm going to put manage and scare quotes here, because they're kind of all over the place. And that's something that organizations run into a lot. And that's the that's the environment that that dam as software and dam as process is really meant to to help get a handle on. So we're going to do a quick poll. So we can get a sense of where, you know, where you are in your in your journey. So again, I'm going to be saying dam on every slide, what's your damn situation? Do you, you know, you have no formal dam and you really need one. You have a dam, but you don't use it well, you know, a lot of these things can be tricky to set up and use consistently. Or maybe you are just here for the puns, you heard that we're going to be doing a lot of dam puns, you have already have a dam, it's great. So let's just take a second to do the poll. Alright, and Andrea is going to let me know I think when that's ready to share. Okay, awesome. Alright, so about evenly split a little bit more people, you know, have a dam, but don't use it well, or don't have a formal dam, and you need one. And I think what this really shows is that, you know, even if you have a tool in place, if you're not consistently using it throughout your organization, it's, you know, it's effectiveness decreases. You know, there's there's, even if you have an initial official dam, and people are still mostly using emails or using slack to share files. That's a lot of stuff that's falling through the cracks. It's really great to get a sense of kind of where people are. Okay, so that's what dam is. That's where you are. Why should I give a dam? You know, why are you here? Why does this matter? So you're probably a hot mess as an organization with your files. And you know, this isn't meant to meant to disparage anyone. But your your file system may be a hot mess. And I created this graphic from this bless this mess show, which I haven't watched, but I'm pretty sure it's like a documentary about raising pigs. And just to really say that you have probably files all over the place that are you know, both online and offline, you may have a system or you may have too many systems like that list that we just saw, you may have no process or too many processes that are competing like someone says, Hey, for this group, you're going to put your files here. And for this group, you're going to put your files here on someone's hard drive. You know, and so the the long and short of that is that finding stuff takes forever. It's really hard to find the exact thing that you're looking for. You're probably getting, you know, random requests from people throughout your organization, like, Oh, I really need this particular image or I really need this particular video. And that becomes even harder to do when you have distributed teams. So I did I have to point out that from now on, I'm going to be calling J pegs, J pigs, because funds. Okay. So what damn promises is a is a new way. And this is just a screenshot from one of my favorite movies, Wet Hot American Summer, the sort of the training montage, where these two characters, you know, work out and really figure out how to become better people. And they're sort of celebrating at the end. And what damn sort of promises is this, this new way. And in the movie, the character says, Can you show me this new way? And then they do the training montage. So with the new way promises is, you know, increasing organization. So you want to get your files organized. The one of the first benefits of that is efficiency, you're able to find files more quickly, more efficiently. So you're not spending tons of time tracking things down, or, you know, just managing your assets. Another big key reason for this is consistency. You know, you want to have you consistent use of the correct assets and the correct formats. You don't want five different versions of your logo that aren't approved hanging out in different places and everyone sort of pulling their own. Another thing that this does is it improves institutional memory. So instead of having like one person who's been at the organization for 20 years, and you're sort of relying on their encyclopedic knowledge of, you know, hard drives that are stored around the physical office, you have that institutional memory on a digital platform where you can collaborate, where you can collaborate in a distributed way. They should really be seen as collaboration tools, where if you're working with different members of a team, you're trying to come together to find the right assets to create something you're going to be able to collaborate more effectively with a dam system in place. And also inspiration. If you have materials that are organized, it's going to be easier to find things that truly inspire you and that truly inspire your audiences. And this is just putting a quote here from Jill Schwartz from American Forest, who we help them with their with their dam search. And the reason that that they were looking for a dam was really to get a handle on all of their digital assets. They're, you know, like we've seen before disorganized lots of different systems. And by really taking the time to understand what they were looking for, figuring out how to search through the dam and find the right platform that fit their needs. Now they're better able to organize and find assets and spend more time creating and communicating than just sifting and searching. Okay, so hopefully you're saying, Okay, this is great. Damn me. I'm excited. I'm ready to go. We need dam and we need it right now. As we're going to pump the brakes for just a second and say, Okay, hold up. Okay, dam just isn't just a software. So who are your dam people? Who are your what's your dam process? Where's your dam governance? You have to take take time to look at these aspects of how you're going to use any technology or any platform in your organization. And just to go into that a little bit more, you know, it's important to think of dam or digital asset management as a capability, not just a software. It's the connection of the people who use your assets, the processes that dictate, you know, like how people find things, how people edit things, how people deploy them. And then the technology, the tools and platforms where your assets are stored. And around all of that is your governance, which is really, you know, what are the rules and guidelines for asset use? And, you know, I want to stay on the slide for just a second, because it is so important, it's with where so many organizations kind of rush to get a new technology, and then don't end up using it well and kind of fizzles. You know, whether that's a dam or a CMS or an email tool, or a fundraising platform, you know, the the the true value of any tool is how well it's used by the people who are intended to use it. So part of getting a better handle on your digital assets is really spending the time to understand, you know, that it's a capability, and that each of these aspects has to be, you know, clarified and understood and incorporated to be successful. And this is just an overview of kind of asset management processes and governance, just to give you a sense of what it really means to have processes in place to sort of simplify the complexity of asset, you know, creation and ingestion and use. And this is something that ideally you have documentation that maps out how all of these things happen. So the process from where do we get our assets from is that internal, you know, internal communications people? Is it freelancers that we're, you know, hiring to shoot video at our events? How are we sourcing those assets? How are we ingesting them and refining them, like putting them into the dam? And then how are people using them? The all every aspect of that should be documented and clear for anyone who's using the dam to really say, OK, if I'm going to search for an asset, here's where I go to search for it. If I need to get an asset, if I need to get some video for an event, here's how I request it. Here's the process that goes through. And that's kind of a continuous process that sits above kind of collection management and system administration, which is really, you know, that you don't just dump all of your files into a folder and say, OK, great, it's all there. Go find it. You know, the collection management is how do you get stuff added over time? How do you archive stuff? How do you remove things? And system administration is how are we making sure that the right people have access to do the right things at the right times? You know, we don't just want everyone in the organization to be able to do everything with the dam. We need someone who can sort of define what those roles are and, you know, help people with their passwords and things like that. And that overall, you really do need to have governance, which is your documentation, your rules and your guidelines that really spells all of this out clearly. And, you know, this is why we put it put the section before we even talk about the features of a dam or the pricing of a dam or the different specific dam dam platforms or software that's available. Because without this in place, you could get an amazing system and, you know, and then it just doesn't end up getting used or it gets used 50 percent, which in many times, many, many ways is is actually worse than not being there at all. All right. So we're going to do another quick poll. How is your dam governance? So nonexistent. We don't have any clear processes documented. Is it OK? So you have a system in place, but there are lots of gaps and ad hoc processes. So maybe you say, OK, all of our files go in the Google Drive, but then a lot of people still put them on in Dropbox or on their personal hard drive. And then great is you that slide that I just showed, you've got some version of that in your organization and people follow it religiously. We'll kind of see how see how folks are. Awesome. I can't wait till we get to the Q&A at the end to see who has the really great governance that's followed consistently. Yeah, this is great. So, you know, what one of it we find that a lot of clients, a lot of organizations are kind of in the middle, that there is some system, there is some documentation, but there's lots of gaps. And that's particularly where governance is very important, not just in like a set it and forget it kind of way, but making sure that you're building awareness and buy in throughout the organization of exactly what the processes are and how they should be followed so that you don't have 70% of people doing it the right way, but 30% of people doing it the wrong way, which causes problems for everyone. OK, so how to dam your org? So if you're kind of wanting to move to a new dam or kind of improve the dam that you currently have, there's kind of three big sort of steps or phases that you want to follow. The first is gathering requirements, and that's really getting into what are you trying to do with the dam and why? And then once you have those solidified, then you can evaluate vendors. You can look at particular, you know, particular platforms that, you know, provide different types of features and may get you what you need to do. And then third is implement. So starting to actually roll out the dam and we'll get into a couple key points for each of those. But it's really important to kind of follow this general arc, so you're not just saying, OK, this software, the price is about right and it has the amount of storage that I need. Great, we're going to do it and then just go from there. It's really important to sort of break it down in this way. So when we're talking about gathering requirements, we're talking about a couple of different things. So again, thinking through the users and the processes, who is going to be using the dam, who's going to be contributing to it, who's going to be managing it, who's going to be searching. And this is where you really want to get into those specific users. So maybe you're starting with your comms team and, you know, who are the users in your comms team? Exactly what do they want to be doing? That's going to help you clarify, you know, a lot of what you wanted the system to be able to do for you. This is where you can start understanding your storage space and file types. So how much space do you actually need? You know, one of the key cost drivers of dam software is storage space. How much you're actually storage you're using. Search use cases in taxonomy. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute, but like, what are you actually searching for? In order to have a powerful search within a dam, you need to have a clear sense of the types of things you're looking for so that you can establish a good taxonomy or organizational schema. And then finally, what are some of the key features and integrations you're looking for? You know, perhaps, you know, very common integration that organizations are looking for is someplace that can serve images from their dam to their website so that if they update an image on their dam, it will update on the website and they don't have to manage one version of an image in their asset management platform and another in their CMS. So that's kind of at a glance the gathering requirements phase of damming your org. And then when it gets to evaluating vendors, there are tons, there are dozens of dam platforms out there. A lot of the key things you're going to be looking for are usability and a lot of a lot of platforms will give you a trial or let you really get hands on with your team to get a sense of how usable it is. How does it feel to actually do the day to day work of finding files? You know, that's that's very, very important. And then the other piece is cost. You know, a lot of what that boils down to is how many users need to use the system and how much space do you need? And you don't always assume that you need more and more users and more and more space. There's a lot of sort of nuance there that can help you really dial in your requirements. Another key thing is onboarding and support. So when you're looking at different platforms, what does the process look like for getting it set up? You know, are they just are they going to give you the keys and you just sort of drive off the lot and go? Or are they going to help you set it up and walk through it and sort of customize it to your particular needs? And then what kind of support do they offer moving forward? And that support level will be different, you know, for different organizations. Some people have really dedicated, you know, teams or team members that really know how to use these platforms and and might not need to rely on, you know, everyday support from from the vendor. The last piece is features. And again, this should really be dialed in and dialed back to what the requirements are. A lot of a lot of damn platforms have very advanced features that you might not ever need to use. And there's no reason to get something, you know, thinking, oh, down the line, maybe we'll do that. If you're not going to use an advanced feature, you know, really, really weigh the way the feature set against what your actual needs are. And then once you've done that, really thinking through the implementation. And this is something that, you know, in another version, I could have put this even before the gathering requirements, which is really planning your rollout. So who is going to start using the damn? What's that process going to be like? Are you going to try to move all of your assets over at once or kind of a small batch and get buy-in from people in the organization of, you know, a significant change to your processes is coming. So you want to be starting to plan your rollout from the beginning. One of the things that you can do is to start small. So a lot of clients that we work with like to pull in either their public relations team or a comms team or some relatively small team to say, we're going to start with this team. We're going to get the assets and we're going to create processes that we can follow. And then we'll take that out where we'll roll three other teams in and we'll roll four other teams in. And while we're doing that, we're tweaking the system. We're doing a lot of iterative enhancements. Maybe we're updating the search criteria. You know, maybe we're changing user roles. You know, there's a lot, a lot of fine tuning that some of the best, you know, the damn platforms allow you to do and by starting small and and and sort of planning a rollout where you're solidifying what you're doing, you're going to have a better, a better product and a better capability as you roll out through through your whole organization. I'll just put these up here briefly just to see the step side by side. But again, we'll be sending around this the stack and there'll be a video of this so you can sort of have this, you know, at your at your disposal, you know, one of the key pieces that we put here is a most most organizations will really quickly jump to number two, right? They'll say, OK, we have this much budget, you know, we have 40 people in our organization, so we need 40 users and we need five terabytes of space and they'll just kind of look for the thing that fits that fits the price tag or their budget. And those efforts are often bound to not be as successful because the, you know, you really need to spend time thinking about who's using the system and how they're using the system and how it's going to be implemented and supported over time. Yeah, so I'll put that there for a second. OK. But which dam should I get? So, you know, if you're, if you've already done that or you're kind of thinking like, what are the general types of ranges of platforms that are out there? This is just kind of a conceptual model that we use to sort of really think through three different kind of levels of dam. One would be something that's very minimal, which is kind of online storage that you can have in different folders. You can make it more or less searchable. You can add users, but it doesn't have a lot of the kind of advanced features. So some of you may be using Google Drive or some of you may be using Box or Dropbox. And I'll say that even some of these minimal solutions are starting to add more features that that let them kind of approach becoming a full featured dam. So if you're really looking to kind of like cut costs or you have a really small team and really kind of niche use cases, then maybe something like a Box or Dropbox could work again. So much of it depends on good governance. Then you have a sort of a mid-tier level, which are fully dedicated dam systems. But that they have a lot of the features that most mission driven organizations need, you know, in terms of being able to collaboratively upload and organize assets, having really robust search and metadata and taxonomy features, as well as other sort of basic integrations. And then you have kind of a category that's enterprise. This is where you get into your oracles or your Adobe experience manager or Salsify, etc. And these are really, really, you know, like these are, you know, this is like your Coca-Cola's of the world are going to be on these platforms, organizations that have, you know, thousands of marketers or communicators distributed around the globe that are working from the same system. The price scales accordingly. So, you know, what we found with our clients is somewhere in that mid-tier is normally what they need. You know, we've taken a look at a lot of the enterprise systems and a lot of the a lot of them are just at the scale that most most of our our clients just don't don't really need. OK, so we're going to do two kind of quick exercises and then we'll get to some QA. So one little game that we're going to play is called Where's Where's the Dam JPEG? And this is really to underscore the importance of searching and taxonomy for your for your dam to really be powerful, right? Because if it was just about putting stuff neatly in folders, Google Drive can do do the work for you, right? You have clear folders, put the stuff in the folder. That's great. But when you want to be able to really hone in and find very particular assets, that's where thinking about it in terms of search and taxonomy becomes really important. So I like this like this scene from The Matrix where they they're about to go into balance. They were going to need lots of guns and then just like they all by right. So imagine you're saying we need we need images and now you have a thousand images or 10,000 images. How are you going to find this specific image? It's really what you're looking for what's really going to be effective for whatever purpose you have. And that's where taxonomy comes into play. Taxonomy can be called a lot of different things, organization, categories, classification, metadata. But when we're talking about it in terms of digital asset management, it's really your system that lets you categorize and organize your assets. They can be found and used through searching and filtering. And again, that's why we'll we'll do the exercise here. That is really about what are you looking for? And by having a clear organizational scheme for your assets, you can find things more effectively. So if you're thinking, OK, well, what I don't know what tax on a means I have in place, you know, this is a sort of an exercise that you can do, you know, go to your own website and your own materials to identify taxonomies because they're often, you know, sort of hidden in plain sight. And they give you a lot of ideas for how you can categorize your assets. So go to your website, look at your IA or your menus, look at the emails and the folders you have, look at project names across teams or marketing campaigns. You know, all of these places are areas where you may have formal documented taxonomies or even informal taxonomies that are in place. So what we're going to do here is just a quick exercise. You can do this on your own if you have examples or questions about this, you can bring them up in the chat at the end. But the point of this exercise is really to help you get clarity around the types of searches that you're that you're looking to do. And it takes the form of in order to create blank, I need to find blank. And the reason we put it in this order is that you're you're looking for assets for a reason, right? You're not just like, I just want to find some assets. You need to create a particular, you know, piece of communications or, you know, file or document. You need to create something. You need to do something. And so you need to find particular assets. And so what I want you to do is like think through, you know, a time or times when you are trying to find particular assets for something. So it could be, you know, oh, I need to find images for an annual report. Right. But then as you go through that process, you're thinking, OK, well, what kind of images do I need? OK, well, I need images that that are out in a in a national forest that are in California because one of our major funders is from California. And I need images that are, you know, horizontal rather than vertical because I that's what I really want on this page. And I need I need images that relate to deforestation. And some of those examples of taxonomies or categories are listed there below. So you can really really think through specifically what you're trying to find. So, you know, I need to create a blog post and I really want an image that shows a volunteer planting a tree that's related to a corporate sponsored fundraising initiative, right. And so then, OK, I need to look for everything that's been funded by, you know, Coca-Cola as a partner and people picture of a person that is planting a tree that's kind of an activity. So just take a few seconds and jot down some notes about this. Part of what you'll do when you do this work sort of more deeply with your teams is identify out of all those searches, what are those common taxonomies that emerge where you want to be able for anyone in your organization to say, I really want to find pictures that are in forests that relate to deforestation. So then that becomes part of your taxonomy part of your organizational scheme. So you can quickly find those pictures. So this is this is a really key key part to unlocking the potential of digital asset management is taking the time to think through those searches. OK, and another way to really start getting into the details of, you know, getting ready to either advance the dam that you have currently or to identify a new a new system. We've put together this this questionnaire, the damn questionnaire, answer the damn questionnaire. And it's basically Andrea is going to put links to up in the Zoom chat to you could either grab this as a Google Doc and copy it, fill it out in that, or you can download it as a PDF. But this is really a way to start organizing some of your particular organization's needs that would sort of lay the foundation for that planning that we talked about earlier up in that first column. So you can take a look at those files now will kind of explain what these questions mean and then can fill those out on your own at your own time. Or if you have questions or thoughts about them, you can bring them up in the Q&A period, which is coming up here shortly. So what do you want to achieve? You know, what are you trying to do with your dam? You know, where are files currently stored? Also, you know, what kind of files are you are you going to be using? How much storage do you need? How many users need to manage the dam versus need to search in the dam? So a lot of the the platforms will have kind of more like administrator roles that allow you to do lots of things within the dam. And that might be a small, a very small portion of your organization that might be four people or two people. But you might want 40 people to be able to search within the dam. So getting a sense of how many users you have and what they need to do can help to kind of hone in on your requirements. Do you have governance? That's what we talked about a little bit above. Do you have an established taxonomy? And again, this is where you can look to your website or look to dams that you currently have in place. Like how how organized are you? Right? Do you just basically have a year with a bunch of images in it or events with a bunch of event images in it? You know, how establishes your taxonomy? And then finally, do you do you need any advanced features? And in the in the questionnaire, there's kind of a list of some more common advanced features that some of the bigger platforms provide. And that's more really just to start get it jogging your head about, you know, if if there are particular things that you really need the system to be able to do. So I'll pause for just a second so that people can open that up and you don't have to fill it all out right now. But just, you know, have take a look enough so that you have a sense of what's in there. And then I think we're ready to open it up for questions. So any damn questions. Great, we didn't have any tactical questions come in. But Gordon did note in the chat that and their organization is using Dropbox, but governance is a challenge. So I wonder if you could talk, Adam, a little bit about, you know, what people might do if they have a tool or don't feel like they can make a switch to a new tool, but really want to work on the governance side of this. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And Dropbox is really powerful, right? Dropbox has a lot of a lot of things that, you know, allow you to do this work relatively well. But yeah, if you don't have the governance in place, a lot that falls away. So I would say a couple, couple things to get started. One would be getting a sense of how documented your processes are. So kind of doing a governance audit, like what what do we have documented so far that we can rely on if it's not documented, start documenting it. Then the other piece is really identifying, you know, where the lapses and governance are happening and sort of making a list of those so you can see what to kind of course correct around. Another key part of that is who who are your users? Like who's doing what who's allowed to do what in the system and are they are they adequately on boarded or educated into the governance because a lot of times you can have governance. But if people don't know that it's there or they're they're not aware that it's been updated or they're not, you know, held accountable if they're if they do something that's outside of the governance, then, you know, then it might as well not exist. So again, like the the pieces of that are really documenting what you currently have or looking at your documentation, you know, seeing what kind of users you have and what they're doing and really sort of articulating the the list of where the governance is is is falling down, you know, because it might be that people are putting things in the wrong place, right? So how do you really clearly communicate? Hey, when you're putting an asset into Dropbox, here is the step by step process for doing that. Another piece on the on the documentation is really ideally establishing some, you know, organization wide a place widely known in the organization that is the source of truth documentation for your governance. So maybe that's a wiki, maybe that's like an internal, you know, an internal resource page that you manage, but something that basically says, hey, if you're using Dropbox, here's how you use it. Here are the processes to follow when you're uploading if you need to grant guest access to someone for a particular folder. And most importantly, clarity about who's managing and maintaining that governance documentation. So, hey, have a question about, you know, why this is the way it is contact, you know, Adam in the strategy department or whoever's kind of managing, managing those assets. Yeah, a couple other comments Gordon shared about some of the challenges is that, you know, they've got their photos and videos structured in folders by years and by events, but that, you know, many gigabytes of those files also live in shared folders. And I think that's a really interesting use case, Gordon, because it speaks to some of the limitations of Dropbox. Dropbox works really well as sort of general file management, but is pretty tied to a hierarchical folder structure. If you do start to look at kind of the next tier of more asset management specific tools, and particularly the ones that are focused on things like marketing assets and visual and video assets, they start to have a bit more flexibility around things like taxonomy, as Adam mentioned, so that even if things are in folders, they can live in multiple places with tags effectively. So you could tag something as, you know, we're using a lot of tree examples because we worked with American forests on a similar project, but, you know, you could tag something with a particular forest name or type of tree and it could live in the event folder. It could also live somewhere else. I mean, we'll be able to find it by searching the the other comment that Gordon made was that pretty much everyone is about to do is allowed to do anything. And I think that's another real big challenge of this user management piece, you know, something like a Dropbox or a Google Drive tends to have more kind of both broad strokes, permissioning or individual file level permissioning. And Adam alluded to this earlier, but one of the great things about some of the asset management specific products is and they have user types that are better configured for these sorts of things. So often they will have a user type that is just someone who can download assets. So if you have a, you know, external freelancer who does graphic design for you and you just want to give them access to here's all of our brand assets. Here's all of our images. There is sort of a defined user group for that in most cases. So there can often be sort of a tipping point between we're using Dropbox, we're using Google Drive and while we need something really specific to say our marketing assets. So that can be an interesting comparison. Yeah. And I'll kind of piggy back on that point about kind of living in multiple places, you know, in different file structures and things like that. So, you know, one of the things in many of those mid tier, mid tier dam platforms is the ability to sort of say things live in one place. So like you have a set folder structure and maybe, you know, maybe it's year and event, you know, events and marketing materials, whatever kind of core structure makes sense. But then you have your taxonomy, which allows you to sort of tag and categorize those assets for search. And then in addition to that, as Patty mentioned with user roles, you could have some users that are allowed to make their own collections, which don't actually move the files around, but sort of make the collection of assets that make sense to them for their particular use cases. Right. So what you don't want is, you know, a bunch of files in your events that then someone copies or worse just moves to their own folder that's like marketing events or in person events or fundraising events. Like you don't want those files to be duplicated in multiple places. You don't want them to be moving around, but it is very powerful to allow users to say, I just want to see a particular subset of events. And that could be a broad category like, you know, fundraising events. Here are all the pictures from fundraising events. Pictures still live in the events folder, but I've created my own curated collection of fundraising images, videos, etc. That I can use and my team can use. And that becomes that becomes very powerful when you give again with user permissioning. Maybe it's just the head of each department or a manager in each department is allowed to create a collection that then only their team is allowed to see. Right. You can get really granular in creating creating these collections and giving people access access to them in different ways. And as you kind of get further up the scale in your platforms, some of that user management has a lot of a lot of stuff baked in. So when Patty mentioned the, you know, adding a user who was able to to, you know, an external freelancer who is able to download materials, you can put logic in place to say they're allowed to do that for one month. And this is the person who gave them access and if they want to get access again, they have to request access and that request will go to this user. So there's a lot of that user management stuff that gets increasingly baked in, you know, baked into platforms. You know, one of the more advanced features that some of the enterprise tier offers is built in workflow where the system itself will say, OK, Andrea submitted a photo. Adam, is it approved? Adam approves it and then it goes to Stefan for final final use, right? So that and again, that's stuff that can be managed just through clear governance and documentation. But the larger up your organization scales, the more you might need to rely on the system to do some of that work for you. And there's some chatter in the chat about, you know, this distinction between one file in multiple locations and, you know, versus just living in one place and being able to access it or curate it in different ideas or in different spaces. And that leads me to think about a question we hear really often, which is like, how do I know how much space I need? Because, you know, Gordon, to your point, the challenge with having something in multiple places is now you're just having, you know, double, triple, quadruple the space. If everyone who uses that file copies it and puts it in their own Dropbox folder for their own space on your shared drive. And so that's often a question people have is like, how much space do I need on my asset management platform? How would you go about answering that, Adam? Yeah, I think so there are a couple of different ways to address that. So one would be thinking of it again as assets that you intend to use for some reason. So, you know, a lot of organizations will have, you know, 500 hours of video of events. But that's just all the unedited raw video from events that they've ever done. But they have B-roll and then like specific video packages from those events that they want to access more frequently, right? So one of those, like all of the videos from from all of time for your events, all of that doesn't necessarily need to live on the dam, right? That's where you can you can easily use something like a box or Google Drive or a Dropbox and say, hey, for any of our stuff that we don't need to search through, we don't think we're ever going to really pull it up, but we still want it somewhere. You can offload it to a system like that where it's not using up storage space. So that's one sort of big conceptual framework to think about, which is, you know, what's what's the plan to use the material? If there's a plan to use it, is there a plan to be able to search for it and find it to be used? Then it's a really good candidate to be in, you know, in the in the official sort of standard dam. If it's not going to be used, you know, put it in an archive and you know, that I would say like that's that's the biggest distinction. Your your mileage is definitely going to vary in terms of how much space you actually need. But I would say that it might be less than you think and particularly with some of the more mid tier solutions, the costs go way up with the more storage you get, right? So the difference between 500 gigs in a terabyte can be considerable and from one terabyte to two terabytes can be very significant. So that that gets to the starting small piece of the of the implementation as well. Like what are what are the main materials you need for your communication team? Let's get those in there and see and you know, different vendors will help you calculate how much you actually need based on what assets you have. But yeah, those are hopefully some useful frameworks for thinking about that. That also raises a question about, you know, you started to hint at some files could be in a different spot. And you know, we're giving a lot of examples here about use cases of assets one might use for outreach, right? Photos and videos. This is what we do marketing and outreach to our audiences. But obviously, organizations have tons of other files. And you know, you you may choose to store archival video somewhere different than you store the you know, the photos you're using day to day or your marketing team is using day to day and needs to access quickly. And can you talk a little bit about that? Like how people may draw lines between what what assets ought to go in a damn platform versus not? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think increasingly like as you as you said, a lot of you know, most of materials you're working with are probably digital, right? So that could be consent release forms or contracts with that you're using with freelancers. Those could go into the damn, right? Or they could go into another file storage system. You know, you could have all of your PDFs, you could have your press releases in the damn, for example, and you know, most mid tier to enterprise tools will actually index the materials of PDFs so that you can do deep searches within the PDFs to find particular phrases or content. So that's why we have in that in that questionnaire, you know, what kind of assets you wanted to put on the damn. And, you know, we have been talking a lot about video and images because those are, you know, so important for marketing purposes. But really think through like who's using the damn? What are the use cases that come up a lot in your organization? And part of planning that rollout is thinking, OK, even if we're starting with comms or even if we're starting with marketing or fundraiser or kind of whatever group you have that's going to really spearhead this, you know, find relationships with other people across the organization and say like, hey, what do you have problems finding on our intranet or on our Google Drive or, you know, whatever the case may be and really dig into those search use cases, right? Because I think you all more often than not find some surprising and interesting ones. And so I think, you know, really, again, it comes back to the use case. Like what do you need to be able to search for effectively within the damn? You know, it's not an archive. It, you know, parts of it can be used in an archive, but there are more cost efficient ways to kind of just archive all of your stuff. And Greg called out in our chat that the shortcuts function for shared drives in Google Drive is a great way to sort of replicate this idea of a collection, right? You can sort of store, quote, unquote, or access a file from multiple places in your Google Drive and not have to create a copy of it. And so, yeah, some of the tools have sort of similar approaches to that. But the idea of not, you know, really exponentially growing your space by having everyone copy the file is sort of the gist of it. And one of the questions that we hear a lot is how people might roll something like this out. There's been some questions and folks raising challenges in the chat about governance. And, you know, there are some challenges that come with that. And I think even just the roll out, right, like getting the adoption as a baseline before you can really think about maintenance and enforcement of the governments can be a challenge. So where would you start thinking about that? Yeah, I think the start small, you know, revise, iterate, enhance, you know, fine tune, tweak, all that good stuff. So, you know, people, I mean, the first thing that most people in the organization you'll hear is when you say, oh, we're going to get a new blank. People go, oh, God, I'm going to have to learn a new blank, you know, or I don't want to change. I got the way that I do it. So the smaller the smaller the group you can start with that you can bring on board to realize that are excited about the value of that, right? That it doesn't feel like a burden. It feels like an opportunity. So maybe it is again, this is partly just from our experience is working with like a small comms team of maybe two or three or four people that they're like, we really need to be able to find our stuff better so we can write blog posts faster. We can put together annual reports. We can put together special fundraiser reports. We need to find our stuff better and faster. Everyone else in the organization, they probably need that too, but we need it now. You know, they're excited, they're motivated, they have the primary use cases that you could really sort of drill into and go, oh, like how how can Dan make your daily life better? And starting there, really getting people excited about what it's going to provide to them. And then really prioritizing like what we're going to start with, right? We're not going to pull over all the assets. We're going to pull over, you know, just our our event videos or B-roll and our video packages from events. We'll start applying the taxonomy. We'll create, you know, best of video out of it and we'll see how that worked. And as we're doing that, we're documenting our process in a shared location so that we can say, oh, here's where it's working. Here's where it's not. Here's where it's unclear. Here's where we would probably need to enforce it if we roll it out to a larger group. Yeah, so I just can't stress enough the idea of like starting small with a group of people who, you know, really want to change. And that that's often the case for most, you know, organizational transformation initiatives. Find the people who who are going to show up and be excited to do the work. I will point out, too, that that can often be a way to test it out in a pretty budget friendly way. One of the things people are often concerned about with trying a new tool or shifting to a new tool is cost. And I think particularly in our nonprofit space, no one wants to be spending tens of thousands of dollars on a new tool. We don't know if we need. We don't know if people will use. But I will point out that the two biggest drivers of cost for an asset management platform are the number of people you have using it and the amount of storage space you need. It can grow pretty exponentially in cost if you're trying to store hundreds of terabytes of things. But if you just want to get, for example, you know, all of the images the teams use in emails into one place so that they are easily accessible or if you want to get all of your brand assets into one place. And it's really just your three person marketing team that uses them. You could probably do that fairly cheaply and test it out and see where it goes from there. So the cost is really hinging on those two items and maybe not as insurmountable as many folks might think. I put out a last call in the chat to see if there's any final questions. It didn't look like there were any. Is there any last ones that folks topics people wanted us to address while we're here today? We've got just a few minutes left. Right. Well, I'll keep an eye on it if one pops up. But Andrea, do you want to maybe just share our what are our wrap up logistics? Folks will be receiving some materials from us. Correct. Thank you, Patty. We're going to be sending everyone that registered a copy of this recording as well as the copy of the presentation deck that everyone was able to view today. So be watching for your emails that will be coming to you soon. Thanks everyone for joining us today. It was a really interesting discussion. And if you'll have questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're always happy to talk dams and puns. Thanks. Good afternoon all. Take care.