All arts organisation have multiple cultural venues to manage; from art galleries to museums to regional and local art centres. Their media archives are often massive and disorganised. But when you have a cultural history to share and a hundred stories to tell, yet little time to do it in and no centralised database to retrieve assets to help you best illustrate your stories, it becomes a real challenge.
So, if seamlessly sharing fascinating art world stories to attract creative minds from all over the world is the goal, how do arts and culture institutions organise their media and big historical archives in this modern world?
Take Back Control of Your Media with a DAM
Until recently, many arts organisations have relied on generic file storage systems like Dropbox or Google Drive to organise their growing media libraries. But the accelerated demand for content, combined with the rise of distributed teams has created new challenges – making image search and sharing costly and time-consuming tasks.
In the UK and Europe, arts and cultural organisations like the Landmark Trust and Museum Of Youth Culture rely on the PhotoShelter for Brands digital asset management (DAM) platform to centralise and organise their valuable media libraries, so they can preserve and share content about fascinating UK history.
But a DAM like PhotoShelter isn’t just a powerful and secure data storage unit; it also offers advanced smart solutions like automatically adding metadata tags using artificial intelligence and social media integrations to help share content with your audience quickly and seamlessly.
Plus, the ability to build and manage your archive using FTP will help transform it into a steady flow of content.
3 Ways Digital Asset Management Powers Your Content
Preserve your Brand Story
As an arts organisation, your valuable media collection has a history that may date back years, decades, and even centuries! Gone are the days of storing brand content on a local office file server, desktop, or hard drives. Managing an organisation’s legacy and preserving it for future generations requires having a future-proof and accessible place to store it securely.
That’s where PhotoShelter for Brands comes in.
Although many DAM platforms can be used as a database for archiving and retrieving files for arts organisations, here’s why PhotoShelter’s platform solutions go further:
- Our DAM makes file organisation much easier, helping your teammates or external partners browse your library to find files quickly.
- You can create Collections to store Galleries of content in your DAM Library to organise content for new exhibitions, workshops, and displays.
- Powerful metadata tools mean you can record image copyright and licensing information.
- PhotoShelter AI enables you to search and instantly find and check the consent status of the subjects within the images stored in your media library.
- Collaborate beyond your team. You can add external contributors, like freelance consultants or curators, to a Workspace with appropriate security levels to work on specific projects.
In other words, PhotoShelter helps bring people and content together, acting almost like a real library that is a meeting place for people, ideas, and information!
Amplify Your Organisation’s Message
A DAM enables you to collaborate across your venues on content creation, or prepare events and special media programmes very easily.
In a typical scenario of an arts organisation looking to promote their next exhibition, here’s how it works:
- You have your retouched digitised assets and uploaded them to your DAM system. After gathering them and choosing some for the promotional campaign of your next event or art exhibition, the next step is to share them with your audience as quickly and easily as possible.
- Using PhotoShelter’s integrations with Canva and Hootsuite, this task takes no time. Your social media team can access images from your PhotoShelter Library directly in Canva; create a graphic to promote your art exhibition and then share it on socials in seconds using Hootsuite.
- You can also collaborate with external printers for the production of exhibition programmes and displays, using PhotoShelter Workspaces.
- Want to provide members of the press or other external stakeholders access to your assets without giving them access to your entire Library? It’s possible with PhotoShelter Portals. Portals are public-facing websites that can be branded with your organisation’s logo. It’s the place where your Invited Users can view and download, and in some cases, purchase files. You can also add watermarks to protect your images from improper use.
Support Commercial Opportunities
Beyond promoting and telling your story to visitors and the creative world at large to build organisational awareness, arts and cultural organisations often work with fundraising and gifting teams and sponsors to support their profitable goals. In order to unlock potential support through donor channels, these teams, which are often remote or contracted, need access to your organisation’s media library so they can build impactful stories, reports, and campaigns. Learn how global humanitarian nonprofit organisation, Food for the Hungry grew profitably by 33% over four years due to PhotoShelter for Brands enabling quicker content creation and distribution collaboration.
Having a DAM like PhotoShelter allows fundraising and gifting teams to collaborate with ease by keeping their media libraries organised and helping them speed up the process of sharing their important stories in a timely manner with any and all of their supporters and collaborators.
Your Turn: Take Your Organisation’s Visual Storytelling to The Next Level!
When you have multiple arts venues and hundreds of events to organise and promote, PhotoShelter controls and organises your valuable content – and gives your teams the smart tools to be able to tell your story and share it with your audience.
If your arts organisation hasn’t invested in digital asset management yet, start here to learn how to create a winning business case for DAM. We work with some of the largest arts and cultural organisations around the world and are excited to show you how you too can cut out steps, save time, and open up a world of possibilities for your organisation’s biggest moments.
