Organization’s name: A Child’s Hope Foundation
Founded: 2002
Headquarters: Utah, United States
A Child's Hope Foundation is a dedicated nonprofit organization focused on transforming the lives of children facing adversity. Their mission centers on providing essential support and resources to children who are orphaned or abandoned and put in vulnerable situations..
The goal of a Child's Hope Foundation is to make sure that every child they reach can achieve their full potential despite the challenges they face early in life. To this end, the organization implements The Thrive Program that helps caregivers identify and address the needs of the children based on the UN’s 15 Rights of a Child. These include education support, healthcare, nutrition, and psychological assistance to help children overcome trauma and hardship.
A Child's Hope Foundation also creates spaces where children can learn and grow in security and peace. Their programs are designed not only to meet immediate physical needs but also to foster long-term development.
Today we talked to Kassidy Hancey, Communication Design Manager at a Child’s Hope Foundation about how this nonprofit organization benefits from Pics.io digital asset management.
- Can you please tell me more about your organization? What do you do and what's your goal?
A Сhild's Hope Foundation is working to change the way orphanages are receiving care around the world. We partner with other nonprofits already excelling in these relationships and we provide tools to help orphanages prioritize what can be improved about their facilities to make them more of a home structure instead of feeling like an institution. So, the kids have a place where they can live with loving caregivers either before or until they're able to be reunited with family, put into a foster family, or be adopted, etc.
"What stood out to me is that you guys work with Google Drive already, so we didn't have to use two tools. It's nice that we can just sync everything together all at once. That was a huge deal for us. The integration was very seamless. So that's really nice."
- Sounds great! And what are you responsible for?
I have a lot of roles. My title is Communication Design Manager so I am in charge of all of our graphic design and branding. I make sure that everything that we produce is on brand. I also help our team with internal processes - making sure that those get recorded and transferred into our project management software. So I work in two teams technically.
- What problem did you solve with Pics.io? What was your main challenge?
We have a huge collection of photos being submitted to us by volunteers that go on service trips to Mexico and from partners around the world. We didn't have a great way of organizing them with Google Drive. There's just not the flexibility we needed to be able to sort through images and make it easy to use. The marketing team can usually find assets from these volunteers, but the rest of the company had no good way to sort, search, or access a lot of these files. For example, if someone ever had a presentation or if they were looking for a specific photo of a specific volunteer, it was really hard for people to find the assets they needed.
The reason we chose Pics.io is the keywording feature. We have the ability to go in and manually choose the keywords and then assign them as often as needed to any images. We also use websites because we don't really want most of our team editing these photos or assets - we just want them to be able to find the necessary files afterward. We use websites internally for everyone else to be able to search for a keyword and then find the images that will pop up with that.
That's been a real game changer in how much time we're able to save. It also means that people aren't coming to me all the time asking if I can find this photo for them. This feature has been saving my time specifically, which has been really nice.
- Maybe you can estimate how much time Pics.io saves you approximately?
We definitely go through seasons, but I would say at least 5 to 10 hours a week of searching and finding. A lot of our keywords are targeted towards certain buyer personas that we have. So, we need to add keywords manually either way. And we have volunteers that help us with that.
- You mentioned that you save photos in Pics.io. Do you store any other file types in DAM?
Yes, we do. What we did is we synced our entire marketing department's Google Drive folder. So our entire organization uses Google Drive to manage all of our assets. We synced just our marketing folder with Pics.io. On the back end, we can see all of our files, which I prefer. I don't really like Google Drive's methodology that makes you have to go into the folder to see everything.
In Pics.io you can see all the files, or you can toggle on and off switch to see only stuff that's in the folder you're in, or see everything that's nested below. I love it because I can bulk import a ton of my design files and it goes a lot faster than Google Drive, especially if I have some pretty hefty large Adobe-related files.
So our marketing team uses Pics.io DAM for everything. However, our media folder with all our images and videos, are only published to the website. So that's the only part that everyone else can see. The rest of our marketing files are just for our marketing department. In fact, when I train new onboarding, I get them logged into Google Drive, but then I ask them not to use that. Instead, I tell them to use Pics.io. It's much more user-friendly and easier to look for digital assets. So, that's great.
- Only the marketing team uses Pics.io?
Correct. Anyone on our marketing team uses Pics.io as the default for downloading project files and uploading project files. We also use different features for our media, like flagging photos, color coding, the rating feature, etc. We use all of that and we color-code our folders as well.
The rest of our teams use Piсs.io to find the assets after they've been tagged with keywords, but no one else uses it to organize files. They use Google Drive just as it is.
Literally every single design file that we have (that could be an illustrator file in InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere, or After Effects) will be organized into a folder for the project. Those projects could be anything between website, flyers, presentations, social media posts, stuff for events, and so on. Everything we produce as a graphic design and marketing team gets stored in Pics.io.
- How do you use all the materials stored in Pics.io?
We make sure that our team is always backing up every project we keep weekly, so that if we ever need to collaborate on projects and if someone's out of town or if there's a quick edit that needs to be made, we can easily download each other's files.
- That sounds pretty convenient! Do you work with some external contractors or freelancers?
Not so much. Occasionally we will have individuals who are fundraising on our behalf. We will give them access to Pics.io website, so that they can easily find photos and videos. It is actually super convenient because then we don't have to grant them permissions or authorization to get into our Google Drive. We can just send them the link and collaborate that way.
These people don't ever upload files but they do download the files that we have. I can say that website functionality has been very, very convenient and it's nice too that I can go in and find the folder with the specific photos they're looking for. I can kind of do most of the searching for them and then just send them the entire URL that opens up right where I directed them into. That's a huge time saver for all of us as well.
- What are the advantages of digital asset management for you?
Organizing and keeping track of everything that we have. It's really nice that if we upload multiples of a file, Pics.io automatically recognizes that. A lot of times we'll download a picture, put it in a links folder for a design project, and then re-upload everything.
Pics.io Team
It's nice that for one asset, you can see all the collections where it's stored instead of having a lot of duplicates all over the place and kind of clogging stuff up. DAM just relinks things instead of always making copies over and over again. We'll frequently get stories about kids or orphanages from our programs team. And it's nice that we can attach comments to the photo itself, so that if someone were to stumble across the photo later on, they already have the context that's related to that photo.
The ability to use keywords, descriptions, and other tools that allows us to organize all our files and saves us time, so that we don't have to provide context every time. So anyone that comes across an asset, whether it's in the published website or our backend Pics.io (where just our marketing team is using it), we can all look at it and see and know exactly what it was related to in the past. I would say Pics.io DAM is a huge context tool, which is really nice.
It's nice not to have one person who has to know everything and not to have that responsibility. You can share that information more readily, so that's a big deal. Now, it’s easier for people to find files on their own.
- Do you use different user permissions in Pics.io?
Everyone who has access, has the same access but we've limited who gets that access, so that not everyone on the team can get into Pics.io in the first place. We'll only give access to the people that we want to have full access. For everybody else we use the website feature - that works pretty well for us.
Everything is really easy to see and pull down. It's really nice that I can resize files when I download from Pics.io. I just go to Pics.io, toggle the quality and the size, and I don't have to open some third-party app on my computer to do all that for me. So that's a huge bonus as well. I really like that.
- Thank you so much for the interview!
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