Professional training and coaching organization uses the Widen Collective^® to advance how they work with and measure content

Challenges 

IFM advocates for functional medicine as the standard of care. Their work is primarily focused on education, access, economics, collaboration and development, and research.

They have over 29,000 assets, many of which are content for educational purposes and conferences. For years they tried managing it with file-sharing tools, but people had difficulty searching for those files because they only could only search by filename or the content inside. The search functionality wasn’t robust enough to help them find the exact asset they needed from a particular program or year.

As IFM continued to grow, protecting intellectual property became an increasing concern. Not only was there no way to customize the security of their content, there were no usage metrics to inform their teams about who accessed what content or how often.

Objectives

Organization
Organize content so everyone can find what they need

Sharing
Effectively share content with a growing learner base

Security
Start protecting intellectual property using the right tools

Analytics
Gain access to usage statistics that can inform content decisions

Solution

Widen was a unanimous decision
After researching different possible solutions, IFM determined that they needed a digital asset management (DAM) system. After comparative research with multiple vendors, the Widen Collective^® was the unanimous choice for marketing, IT, and the rest of the company. “Widen had the best interface, the best functionality, and the best price,” said Jane Leuchter, content librarian for IFM.

Providing educational content to their learners is core to their mission. When there was a technical glitch with the old way of sharing that content, they turned to Widen Portals. Jane noted how quickly she was able to create sharable portals for their learner base. Portals worked so well that it got the IFM team thinking about how much more the Collective could do than originally thought.

“Expect that there will be roadblocks and there will be push-backs, but be patient with those because change is hard, and sometimes people are just reacting to the fact that it’s a change rather than the details of the change itself.”

Jane Leuchter
Content Librarian
Institute for Functional Medicine

Benefits

Assets are organized and searchable
The metadata fields in the Collective allow IFM to link contextual data to every asset. This data powers the search functionality, so people throughout the company can find what they need. “It’s had a positive impact on the way we function as an organization,” says Jane.

Control over intellectual property
The Collective gives IFM flexibility and control over what they share and how users can interact with the content on a case-by-case basis. “There’s a lot of really cool stuff that we’re doing with Widen, like the intended use and the end-user license agreements that will help us make sure we have the control we want over our content,” says Jane. IFM also controls whether users can view, share, and download content.

Visibility into content analytics
Previously, IFM had no content usage statistics. “With Widen analytics, we can dig in and see where the spikes are in downloading any content,” says Jane. IFM looks at who’s accessing content, what content is most popular, and what content is underutilized to inform their content strategy. For example, the Collective identified the 10 least popular assets and IFM looked at each of those resources to determine how they could be changed or organized differently to provide more value to their audience. This has been particularly helpful for optimizing their toolkit of 250 resources they give to members.