Best Friends Animal Society is an animal welfare organization that finds homes for rescued pets across America. They use their digital asset management (DAM) system, the Widen Collective^®, to store, organize, and distribute all of their digital assets — which includes a lot of images of ridiculously cute dogs and cats. 

Sarah Kichas is Best Friends’ Photography Manager, and DAM administration is just a small part of her job. It entails managing a constant stream of new content from a diverse group of photographers — including staff, freelancers, and volunteers — many of whom take pictures at just a single event. Giving them all access to the Collective with the appropriate login credentials, permissions, and upload instructions could be a part-time job in itself. 

At the 2019 Widen Summit, Sarah shared how they use the Widen API and Dropbox to turn this onerous upload process into a simple, streamlined workflow. “I love it,” she said, “because it saves me time and energy, and most importantly, my sanity.”

Simpson Strong-Tie is one of the world's largest suppliers of structural building products. Their products include everything from fastening systems and structural connectors to software, and their Marketing department creates promotional material for all of them — both in print and online.

Producing and managing all of this imagery is an enormous job! Just ask Mark Hausler, who is one of their senior graphic designers. However, the recent addition of a digital asset management (DAM) platform with two powerful integrations — Adobe Creative Cloud and Hybris — has dramatically improved the speed and accuracy of their creative workflows.

The work of a marketer is never done. In addition to tackling what’s already on your long to-do list, you’re constantly fielding new ideas to get more customers, faster. It’d be great if you could just hire more people, but that’s not always possible. And sometimes, it feels like even if you had 1,000 people on your marketing team, you could still find work for 1,001.

Joint customers can now leverage the security and searchability of the Widen Collective within Hootsuite to post content and measure performance across major social networks.

Integration enables marketing teams to ingest user-generated content from TINT into the Widen Collective® with metadata and image rights

We’re thrilled to announce our integration with the social display platform TINT. Mutual customers can now ingest user-generated content (UGC) from social media via TINT directly into the Widen Collective with all the metadata, including image rights. The integration enables brands to easily repurpose UGC for marketing initiatives at scale without the risk of misusing images.

Nearly half of Americans use digital voice assistants, according to the Pew Research Center. This new channel presents opportunities and challenges for brands, one of which is delivering audio content straight into the home or office via voice command.

Digital asset management (DAM) systems provide that central source of truth for your assets. Versioning, governance, and metadata help your teams access the assets they need. But assets aren’t created in the DAM. And the DAM isn’t the platform your audience follows. So how do you take advantage of the structure and control of a DAM system when your assets need to be outside of it to be created and used?

How do you give your teams access to assets in the tools they’ve been using to do their job for years? It's just one of the many questions a DAM admin faces.