Admins spend a lot of time in the Widen Collective®. Whether they’re auditing the system, doing some clean up, adding metadata, or sharing a collection with a colleague, we know they take pride in a well-oiled digital asset management machine. But have you ever wondered what all that DAM work adds up to?

We all know that training your users on how to use the Widen Collective is important. If you don’t train them, they won’t know how to use the tool and, eventually, they’ll give up on using it altogether. But training them can be difficult if you’re unsure of where to start. The first step is always listening to users and figuring out what they need. Start by asking questions such as, “How can I help you use the Widen Collective more efficiently?” But what if the response is, “What’s the Widen Collective?” This very well may be the starting point for some organizations, as was the case with Brady Corporation.

What do you do when no one is using your DAM system? When talking about the system involves phrases like, “Ugh, I keep trying to find stuff in there, but I never can!” or, “Ha! I never go in there anymore!” Or when you hear that employees are turning to Google to find brand images, taking screen grabs of them, and using low-resolution images in brand collateral. Well, your initial reaction might be to scream, because that’s the first thing we thought of. But after you let it all out, you may realize that all you need is a DAM cleanup — which was exactly the case for Kerry Ingredients.

The Widen Collective Insights Contest recently came to a close and we’re excited to share our winner and runners-up.

We ran this contest after the release of Quick Insights, which was one of the latest updates we made to our digital asset management analytics offering. Quick Insights gives you visibility into content performance so you can reuse the good stuff — and ditch the not-so-good stuff. While the Insights app provides a holistic measurement of asset performance in a campaign or collection, Quick Insights serves up data for individual assets. Quick Insights is centralized in Quick View, just a click away from any page in the Widen Collective.

The content universe is ever expanding, as more content is being launched into the digital galaxy each day. Readers and buyers want to find content that will comprehensively and intelligently solve their problem or answer their question. But the challenge is that most marketing content is hard to find, poorly conceived, and dependent on highly skilled content creators to be repurposed, reformatted, and redeployed. What’s the solution? Doing all you can to create content that is helpful and then helping readers get to that content.

Maile Thiesen is a first-time digital asset manager at the University Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) — but Maile is no stranger to digital asset management (DAM). Maile first learned the importance of file organization and managing large photo collections studying photography at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Maile is now helping UMass address their growing DAM needs by organizing their digital assets with the Widen Media Collective.

Maile attended the 2015 Widen Summit, an annual conference for Widen customers to teach, learn, share, and grow with one another. In addition to enjoying the cheese and beer that Madison has to offer, Maile learned important skills to enhance UMass’s workflow and keep employees engaged with the DAM.