Pics.io Customer Stories: PEN America

Organization’s name: PEN America
Headquarters: New York City, New York
Founded: 1922

PEN America, founded in 1922, champions the intersection of literature and human rights, advocating for the freedom to write and express globally. Today, the “PEN” in PEN America does not represent an acronym but almost a century ago, it stood for Poets, Essayists, Novelists (later broadened to Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists).

PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network. With over 7,500 members, including novelists, journalists, and allies, it works to protect free speech, combat censorship, and support persecuted writers. PEN America's initiatives range from literary awards and festivals to advocacy campaigns and education on free expression. 

Today we talked with Debi Goldberg - Digital Director at PEN America about how the organization is using Pics.io digital asset management system. 

• Can you tell me more about your organization?

We are a 100-year-old non-profit organization. We produce many events at which we take both photos and videos. In addition, we have thousands of hours of old video footage and archival images that we need to organize.

The relatively modest size of the staff has meant that we've had no centralized repository. We also now have offices in three other cities in addition to New York and our work is primarily cloud-based. The solutions we were using for digital assets were locally networked in our New York office and not user-friendly. 

"I can't believe how well Pics.io DAM works. It's really amazing! Our staff put files in a shared Google Drive just for this purpose and then it shows up in Pics.io".

Our storage included a local NAS drive, 1TB of files on Dropbox, and more than 50,000 images on Flickr. I noticed this challenge right away because putting together an email or a website or anything where you're looking for photos or marketing materials was time-consuming.

So, having implemented digital asset management at my last organization, I knew we needed something. But the case here was different from my last place. We had around 10 or 12 terabytes worth of digital assets of archival files. We needed something cloud-based, but that wouldn't have extraordinary storage fees.

We’re using Google Workspace at PEN, so it made sense for me to find something that could work with it. And I can't believe how well Pics.io DAM works. It's really amazing! Our staff put files in a shared Google Drive just for this purpose and then it shows up in Pics.io. The way we can share assets and the facial recognition feature - I'm so surprised at how well it works every time it happens. It's pretty fun!

• Could you tell me what you are responsible for in your organization?

I'm the digital director. All the digital marketing websites and emails we put out for search and social ads, monitoring all of it, having it all make sense together.

• What departments work with Pics.io at your company?

Several departments do. I'm in the communications department. We're the primary users. Our programming and the people who do the events use DAM mostly for viewing and sharing. We create websites (shareable links of image galleries) for events for participants to view. We also use Pics.io as a place to store stock photography and videos that we purchase.

• What was the challenge you faced? Can you tell me more about your workflows?

Typically after events, we almost always have photographers and even video at most of our events. It used to be that people would put up the photos on Flickr so that they could be shared and then also kept them in either Dropbox and/or our NAS drive, depending on which department. If we have enough staff turnover - you didn't know where we put it. 

We have 71,000 assets in Pics.io now. Previously, if somebody wanted to market their event, we needed to show what the last event looked like. We at the central department didn't always have access to the assets in other offices or happening even just down the hall from us.

The nice thing about Google Drive and Pics.io is that everybody can have access to it because we work in Google Workspace. So nobody feels like they can't get in there. So that is nice.

I also sort of locked down a little bit of Google Drive, so it doesn't become disorganized. We did training with everybody to make sure they understood where to put things and how to name them. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. It's like a never-ending project. But we just have so many files that I think it's just the nature of the work.

• What kind of files do you manage through Pics.io?

Primarily photos and videos. We've been saving videos mostly like mp4s, not raw files. I do have some audio files up there just because some of our archival stuff included audio files.

• What are the advantages of a DAM system for you?

Looking at photos through the interface of either Google Drive or File Manager or the Mac version of Finder, it's really not ideal. Because then you need a well-organized folder structure that everybody is agreeing to and disciplined enough to maintain. You're limited by what you know of the folder structure. If you're looking for something and it could be anywhere, then you're going into every folder. And nobody has time for that.

"I can't tell you how much time I've spent looking through our digital drives and all of the Dropbox files. So Pics.io saves time because now I don't have to think about all our previous storages and files on them. I know exactly how I'm going to find the necessary file. I'm going to go to Pics.io, I'm going to search, and it's going to be there. It's become part of my every day. You don't even think about it anymore.

We purposely upgraded to unlimited storage on Google Drive, so that we could use Pics.io digital asset management. Especially for a nonprofit, it's a no-brainer. The other digital asset management systems, at least in the market in the United States, are very expensive. Their business model is based on storage. So that eliminates almost every nonprofit. No nonprofit can afford those.  

There are a lot of things I do like. For example, the ability to tag multiple things at one time, AI facial recognition, and transcript functionality. Website sharing is nice. I love your transcription feature - I just found it and, oh my god, that's going to be such a game changer for us! Whether we are just pulling a part of what a speaker said to put it on social media or to do a search within the system to find somebody who talked about whatever topic, it's going to be a big help. It reminds me of how face recognition was a game-changer for us. 

• What is your favorite feature in Pics.io?

Both of those have been really important for us. We have a lot of famous people who come to our events. If we need a photo of our CEO, VIP, or specific staff person it's much better to have it all just come up rather than thinking: they went to this event, find the folder for that event, and then go through that folder.

I do like your support people very much. I don't know if you've got them placed around the world or people just don't sleep, but no matter what time it is over here, I find a real person will respond right away on support chat. 

• Can you estimate how much time Pics.io saves you monthly or weekly?

It's hard to tell because we go into seasons of event work. We're about to enter event season. But I would say from a video research perspective, probably hundreds of hours.

I can't tell you how much time I've spent looking through our digital drives and all of the Dropbox files. So Pics.io saves time because now I don't have to think about all our previous storages and files on them. I know exactly how I'm going to find the necessary file. I'm going to go to Pics.io, I'm going to search, and it's going to be there. It's become part of my every day. You don't even think about it anymore. That's what we expect. So that's how I feel about Pics.io.

• Thank you so much for the interview!

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