Year Up Selects Widen DAM to Manage Growing Media Library

MADISON, Wis. - May 20, 2014 - PRLog -- Year Up, a nonprofit organization that provides urban young adults with the skills, experience, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through professional careers and higher education, has selected the Widen Media Collective for its digital asset management (DAM) needs. Year Up currently serves more than 2,000 young adults annually in 12 cities across the United States, and continues to grow rapidly given its proven metrics of success -- 85 percent of its graduates are employed or attending college full time within four months of completing the program. Year Up will use DAM to deliver large amounts of digital assets, quickly and easily, to globally dispersed dealers and distributors.

Year Up's multiple locations had made storage and access to promotional materials an issue. The shared network drive that was used to store images, logos, documents, and raw and edited videos was only available to employees at the Boston headquarters location. In addition to limited access, the folder structure method of organization became very cumbersome.

"We had storage everywhere, there were duplications. There weren't streamlined workflows with some of our contractors," stated Kimberly Littlefield, marketing manager for Year Up. "We also allow our locations create their own promotional materials, and we wanted to enable more visibility into creative ideas between different sites."

After weighing the risks associated with potential hard drive failure and limited access, Year Up's marketing team began to investigate DAM systems that could help centralize their assets, and provide on-demand web-based access to any one of their employees from any of their locations. Workflows, version control, asset security, deduplication, file format flexibility, on-the-fly conversion options, and integration were some of the important features and capabilities they looked for in a DAM solution.

"We assigned priorities and weights to a long list of feature requirements we wanted in a DAM system," stated Littlefield. "We narrowed down our search and scheduled demos with our top three choices."

Year Up selected the Widen Media Collective based on its excellent customer service and robust feature set. Specifically, Year Up was impressed with Widen's archive level storage, which other DAM vendors did not have. Archive level storage gave Year Up a much more cost-effective way to store and maintain large amounts of digital archives.

"We were really impressed by Widen's demo and customer service," stated Littlefield. "They took the time to research our organization and find out more about us. They gave us use cases from some of their other nonprofit customers. We felt the customer service would lend to a level of support that would be unmatched by the other vendors we looked at."

The DAM system will be used to give access to marketing and other department staff at all 12 locations to all of Year Up's promotional materials, which include images, videos, logos, documents, promotional one-pagers, advertisements, branding elements, and fonts. Overall, the DAM will create greater efficiency and visibility with their assets between employees, and between locations.

"Working with nonprofit organizations such as Year Up to help determine what features will best support their team needs is a very fulfilling part of what we do," stated Brenna Hale, Widen advisor. "In addition to it being a great cause, they are also a great use case as to how DAM can help non-profit organizations organize and promote their brand and their mission."

About Year Up Inc.
Year Up's mission is to close the Opportunity Divide by providing urban young adults with the skills, experience, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through professional careers and higher education. Year Up achieves this mission through a high support, high expectation model that combines marketable job skills, stipends, internships and college credits. Its holistic approach focuses on students' professional and personal development to place these young adults on a viable path to economic self-sufficiency. Year Up currently serves more than 2,000 students a year at sites in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Providence, San Francisco Bay Area, the National Capital Region, and Puget Sound (Seattle). To learn more, visit: http://www.yearup.org or http://www.youtube.com/yearupinc.

About Widen Enterprises, Inc.
Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Widen has honed its more than 60 years of experience in premedia services and color management specifically for assisting customers with building brand equity and supporting consistent brand representation across print and Web communications. Through its inventive suite of Web-based digital asset management applications, Widen software services provide marketing networks with real-time, Web-based access to clients' digital asset libraries, subsequently eliminating manual search and file preparation time, costs related to replacing images and videos that cannot be located, and added costs for hardware, software and upgrades. For more information, visit: http://www.widen.com.