Digital Asset Management for Higher Education

It takes a significant amount of content to support all of the audiences, departments, and programs at higher education institutions. Organizing and managing all of this content can be an overwhelming challenge. But with digital asset management (DAM), you're able to create a searchable, shareable library of your institution’s photos, images, documents, videos, and other creative assets. Learn more about how higher education institutions use DAM technology and the many benefits a DAM system brings to universities and places of higher learning.

Examples of digital assets in higher education

Universities often find themselves managing content across schools, disciplines, campuses, and more, which can be incredibly complex. Additionally, departments will often have part-time or work study staff that aren’t always available, making the need for clear, consistent processes and an easy-to-access location for your brand assets even more essential. Consider all of the digital assets universities manage, including:

• Images: Faculty headshots, campus images, event photos (e.g., graduation, sports, etc.)
   
• Logos: Official university logos (including sports teams), event logos, alumni association logos
   
• Videos: Prospective student marketing videos, live-streamed sports events, presentations, conferences, symposiums
   
• Text documents and PDFs: Class syllabi, learning materials, alumni event invitations, class assignments, and other instructional materials
   
• Marketing materials: Videos, brochures, promotional social media content, email content
   
• Audio: Podcasts, recorded lectures, audiobooks, interviews
   
• Library materials: E-books, articles, and other digital content available to students, staff, and faculty 
   

The practice of digital asset management helps universities keep valuable digital assets safe and secure yet still easily accessible — all while ensuring that everyone is using the most updated approved version of each asset.

What does DAM do for higher education?

There are many reasons why organizations — including educational institutions — use a DAM solution. Top among these are the ability to:

• Organize content 
• Streamline workflows
• Protect your brand
• Enable governance

Organize content

Need a photo of your school’s mascot? Not sure which version of the logo to use? Without a DAM solution in place, requests like these may send you on a wild goose chase, spurring a flurry of instant messages, email threads, and server searches in an attempt to get your hands on the necessary asset.

A DAM platform helps eliminate confusion and improve organization by serving as a one-stop repository for all of your digital assets. With a DAM system in place, faculty and staff across your educational institution have a single source of truth from which they can easily access your ever-growing collection of updated, approved, on-brand files. And because DAM technology helps create a sustainable metadata workflow, you can ensure that valuable assets don’t fall through the cracks.

Streamline workflows

Manually searching for digital assets can be a frustrating, time-consuming process. But because a DAM system gives your university greater control over your digital assets, you’re able to streamline content creation and updates. Since a DAM platform holds all of your approved assets in a single location, your staffers can quickly and confidently access what they need. Teams will also have a clear process for asset usage, taking the guesswork out of what assets can be used when and how. 

DAM tools also integrate nicely with several other technology solutions to connect your content and promote brand consistency across channels. Bringing your marketing technology (martech) together, you keep teams using the tools they’re comfortable with while boosting efficiency, inspiring collaboration, and reducing friction in workflows.

Protect your brand

Distributing the wrong version of the high-stakes press release or using an outdated image of the chancellor in the latest brochure can not only lead to confusion and embarrassment but it can also be expensive to fix. A DAM solution helps protect your brand and improve customer experience (CX) with functionality like version control, embed codes, secure content access, and digital rights management (DRM). A DAM system also allows you to develop and distribute clear brand guidelines that ensure all of your assets are used in a consistent, on-brand way. 

Enable governance

With hundreds or thousands of staff, faculty, students, and others accessing your university’s content from various locations, there’s no shortage of people needing easy, secure access to your organization’s digital assets. So how do you keep up with who needs what and which files and assets a specific department or faculty level should be able to access? 

A DAM platform offers permissioning and security functionality that helps you enable clear site governance, ensuring authorized users can access the specific files they need. These permission settings extend across integrations too. And because you can track and manage asset usage in your DAM site, you can ensure that assets are being used in a way that complies with your university’s policies and procedures. 

Getting started

If you’re looking for a better way to securely distribute and access content across your university’s teams and channels, it might be time to consider a DAM solution. Request, watch, or click through a demo to learn more about how Acquia DAM can help you wrangle all of your digital assets into an organized, easy-to-search location that will help you boost efficiency, keep your brand safe, and prevent unauthorized usage of assets.