Pics.io Customer Stories: Build the Era

Organization’s name: Build the Era

Founded: 2020

Build the Era (BTE) is a group that's all about making transportation and infrastructure better in the US. It's run by volunteers and supports the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT). BTE promotes transportation legislation and educates communities about the role and importance of the USDOT. 

Today we talked to Christina Cronin, a Secretary at Build the Era about how the organization is using Pics.io digital asset management in their work. 

• Can you please tell me more about your organization?

Our organization is called Build the Era, and we are a transportation advocacy group that supports the work of our Department of Transportation here in the United States.  We started a group that would go out and help pass legislation that had to do with transportation. We did a lot of campaigns around our Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which passed. Our goal was to secure funds to improve bridges, roads, and railroads.

"Pics.io has been really easy to work with!"

Last year, we wrote and completed a children's book called Rhonda Love's Roundabouts, which is a transportation book for kids that teaches roundabout safety. A lot of people are intimidated by traffic circles or roundabouts, so we realized there was a void. There weren't any children's books about roundabout safety. There were children's books on bicycle safety or how to use traffic lights but not about roundabout safety.

We've been learning a lot about transportation because only one of us or two of us who were engineers had a background in transportation. It's been a lot of fun, but we realized we kept making all these graphics and images. They all ended up in Google Drive and weren't organized.

We decided to check out Piсs.io and find a way to organize all of these so we could easily access them. For example, it's almost Valentine's Day, and we made some graphics last year that had Rhonda - a character that looks like a roundabout - and with Pics.io it was so much easier to find images depicting Rhonda or Valentine’s Day rather than scrolling through Google Drive.

• What you are responsible for in your organization?

I'm the secretary. My job is to take minutes at meetings and manage all of our filing system and our archives. So Pics.io has been really helpful here. We're an all-volunteer group and we all have different day jobs. We have people from about five or six different states all across the country. And it’s much easier to manage all our files with Pics.io.

Our digital files were unorganized and that was the main challenge. Pics.io makes it really easy to organize, find, modify, and reuse files. It's really helped us organize our materials, have an archive, and be able to look back at our history to check, for example, what we did in 2020. And we can find all these materials because we tagged images by date and added different labels. 

• What was the problem you faced before implementing Pics.io DAM?

So that's been huge in terms of just being able to organize it. And we can quickly download the necessary files too, so that’s super useful. 

• What departments use Pics.io in your organization?

Our marketing team - the people that are doing the different graphics. They also download files when they need to. Also, the person who does our newsletter. They're the primary users.

• How many people are using Pics.io in total? 

Right now, it's me, our marketing person, our newsletter creator, and our social media coordinators. Usually, we also pull the images for other people in our group. 

• What type of files do you store in Pics.io? 

We have JPEGs, PNGs, and PDFs. Social media is our biggest use of Pics.io DAM - we can quickly find stuff to post or repost.

• Do you use Pics.io websites for sharing files?

Yes, I have used them to share files with the team, especially during the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law campaign. Once it passed, we did a whole bunch of social media graphics that talked about what types of projects might be coming to each state. We were able to remind people that the current administration was doing so much good work.

• What are the advantages of Pics.io DAM for you?

It’s saving us so much time! We’re a volunteer group and if we're working on something, we need it quickly. And with Pics.io, it's just so easy to find any files we need. Also, we organized DAM the way we wanted. We created our own folder structure and metadata scheme, so we can find things much faster now. 

I used to work at a school doing fundraising years ago. And I wish that they had known about Pics.io back then. We had a similar problem with trying to find pictures of different former teachers or alumni or images from sports teams. Pics.io would make it so easy for them to find a picture of a former high school soccer player when he was in high school so that we could put it in the alumni magazine.

• Thank you so much for the interview!

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