4 Steps for Organizing Assets to Strengthen Your Brand

With the arrival of the new year, there's no better time to prioritize organization and set yourself up for success, starting with your brand assets. This includes not only logo files, but also photos, videos and boilerplate messaging that is frequently used in external communications. To strengthen your brand, expedite content creation and ensure consistency for both internal staff and external vendors, you must keep your assets well-organized and easily accessible. 

Managing brand assets can be a complex task, but having an organized system in place will ensure that everyone has access to the most up-to-date files and that your brand is properly represented across all channels and campaigns. Here are four simple steps to organize your brand assets in the new year. 

1. Gather Your Assets

The first step is to gather your brand assets. Collect your logo files, sub-brand/campaign logos, key partner and sponsor logos, style or brand guide, photo and video assets, and boilerplate messaging. You can also include copywriting samples to establish a tone of voice for your brand. These samples can consist of phone salutations, elevator pitches, exemplary social or email copy, keywords, and your purpose or mission statement. 

If your organization doesn't have a formal style guide outlining how your logo, messaging and other brand elements should (and should not) be used, create a document with basic guidelines, such as colors and fonts. 

Once you've gathered these assets, it’s a good time to create a backup of your files. 

2. Organize Your Assets 

The second step is to organize and upload your assets. It is important to sort your files into labeled folders with clear categories so that any team member can quickly find what they need. For example, rather than placing all photos into one folder, create sub-folders to organize the photos by subject matter, project or other meaningful qualifier that will help your team locate files efficiently. 

Keep your copywriting samples in a Word or Google document so folks can copy and paste quickly, but control who can modify the master files by limiting permissions in the file settings.

It's also important to adopt best practices for accessible file names so team members who use screen readers can easily access your brand assets. Accessible file names use a descriptive, human-readable format with hyphens separating words. For example, an accessible file name is "2020-Financial-Report.pdf" whereas an inaccessible file name is "20financialreportREVISED-v2.pdf." 

3. Choose Your Storage and Start Uploading

Next, decide how and where to store your brand assets. Your storage system should be accessible via URL or the web to ensure collaborators have access regardless of their location. Several web-accessible storage options are available, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Airtable or microsite creation tools, such as Brandfolder. 

Whatever system you choose, it must be simple for your team to use — or better yet, something you are already using internally to promote quick adoption.

4. Tell Your Team

Once your assets have been collected and loaded into your storage system, remember to document and share file storage guidelines with your team to keep your system organized and intact as others begin to use it. Include any relevant links, contact information for questions or feedback, and rules for file naming and folder structure. Share this document with your internal marketing, communications, fundraising, external affairs teams and external vendors. 

Remember to onboard new staff members and vendors with your asset management protocols. Assign one person to take ownership of your system's management, approvals and updates — preferably someone intimately familiar with your organization's brand. Create calendar reminders to check assets regularly for any needed tidying or updates.

Now that your storage system is up and running, set up automatic backups. For added assurance, manually back up your files to an external hard drive or other storage device for redundancy in case of data loss.

Following these steps will ensure that your brand identity is faithfully conveyed and consistently maintained for years to come.

The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.