I’ve been where you are.

For 15 years, I worked in nonprofit communications. The first five years I was there, our image collection was a mess.

I would spend hours tracking down images to fulfill requests from our editorial and web teams, other departments, and designers.

They might have been in one of the hundreds of folders on our server, on my boss’s laptop that he left at home, in cloud storage, or in the email of the colleague who left six months ago.

Those minutes and hours added up and contributed to missed deadlines and missed opportunities to advance our mission.

It became clear that we needed a solution and created our DAM.

I was part of the team that built the system and for ten years I administered and expanded it until it contained well over 100,000 images and videos.

The time savings and improvements to response time were immediate and dramatic.

The development team was able to search for what they needed without assistance; our press releases, e-newsletters, and print materials featured exactly the right images to engage the readers and spur them to action; and we always knew which image was the latest version.