Pics.io Customer Stories: International Literacy Association

Organization’s name: International Literacy Association

Founded: 1956

The International Literacy Association (ILA) is a professional organization dedicated to improving literacy instruction worldwide. Founded in 1956, the organization connects research and practice to enhance the quality of literacy education globally. ILA supports an international network of more than 300, 000 educators through resources, advocacy, and professional development opportunities, contributing significantly to global literacy efforts.

ILA has been using Pics.io digital asset management for more than 2 years now. We spoke with Lara Deloza, Director of Communications, and Wes Ford, Senior Social Media Strategist about how they’re using Pics.io digital asset management with Amazon S3 storage for their work.

- Can you tell us a little bit more about your organization?

Lara:
The International Literacy Association is a professional membership organization supporting literacy educators in 128 countries. Our mission is to connect literacy research and practice to improve instruction across the globe. Our goal is to get every child everywhere the ability to read by having access to books and high-quality instruction.

We support literacy and anybody who works in literacy education. So there are researchers, classroom teachers, reading specialists, literacy coaches, administrators, etc. Sometimes it's just people who support literacy instruction like children's book publishers and other organizations or businesses like that.

- What your team does and what are you responsible for?

I'm the Director of Communications at ILA. Wes is our Senior Social Media Strategist, but we have a very small team, so we all wear many, many hats. Wes is the one who is primarily working with Pics.io at the moment. He's putting all of our video assets into the system.

We do social media, PR, a member magazine, and a blog. Wes and I both work on digital events and support other products and services within the company.

"Pics.io DAM is not only a time saver but convenience, and just allows us to be more productive."

- Wes, so you are the only one working with Pics.io there are other users as well?

Wes: 
We do have other people who can access it. I'm the admin of the entire DAM, so I’m setting it up and getting everything in there. But other members of staff also have access to go in and edit some of the files if necessary, to add comments, or to look at what is archived.

- What was the main challenge that you resolved with Pics.io?

Wes: 
At one point, I had 3 different external hard drives on my desk that contained different assets that we'd collected over the years. There were mostly materials from when we had in-person conferences and they were just monstrous files. We had all of our stuff just sitting in physical space. And if there was a house fire or one of my cats did a bad jump onto my desk, years of ILA video would have been gone because that was the only storage.

Lara:
There were also files on actual laptops and a shared drive, and not in the same folder on the shared drive. The bulk of what Wes has been doing was pulling everything into one central space. We had to get all the materials into a system where we could chunk everything up. Because right now it's all just like raw footage or a full-length edited video. But we want to get to a point where we're actually creating segments that are tagged. So that if I need to build a collection on reading fluency, for example, I can go into Pics.io, type fluency, and everything tagged with that will come up.

Wes:
The bulk of the video was from in-person conferences that we used to do before the pandemic. And since that time, it's been a lot of webinars and digital events. We also have some short-form content, like a series of videos when we released our standards.

- What are the advantages of Pics.io for your organization?

We can make sure that our videos have all the information that we need on them (tags, keywords, etc.) so that they're easy to find and easy for people to use. We also use commenting and tagging features when we’re marking parts that need to be clipped, etc.

I also really did like the website feature for when we're showing stuff off. We have reviewers look at our videos. Websites work wonders - we can organize all the files in a nice presentation rather than saying “Here's a couple of videos that we're sending.”

- Thank you so much for the interview!

"I also want to add from a purely logistical standpoint, the price point is very attractive. We're a non-profit with a very small staff, but we support a large audience and we just don't have budgets for big fancy splashy things.

So it's not like Pics.io is the only platform that does the things that you do, but you did it well. You did it in a way that made sense to us and you did it at a price point that met our budget. So we really appreciate that."

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