User Adoption
or how to get people to come to your DAM party
If you build it, they will come - Field of Dreams
When you have spent countless hours building a DAM or migrating assets into an existing CMS or designing a naming convention or integrating an expansion, don’t get too comfortable thinking your job is done. The work has only begun (unless you are working for a client where your part of the project has been completed, well done - celebrate!) - now you need people to actually use it.
Like discussed in last week’s naming post, the same exercise of pinning photos to a wall (or virtually using Mural) and using Post-its to classify or name DAM assets can be used for other phases in the project. But what else helps with user adoption?
Some hard won points that work for me:
Involve stakeholders early and often
Show don’t tell with showcases
Record and share Zoom meetings for accountability & rewatch
Document process as well as product & update as you grow
Train a core team of DAM champions across silos
Learn the IT, creative, marketing, business and content needs early
Small, frequent wins
When in doubt: snacks
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou
Most of all LISTEN to your stakeholders. They have justifiable fears of change - will this mean more work, less time, fewer colleagues, more complicated processes? When possible, strive for simplicity and replacing (or better yet, reducing) process steps they currently do with smarter ones in the new DAM. Be honest about changes ahead and limitations, even if they are temporary. Ask their current pain points and move forward with the goal of giving them back time to do what they were hired to do - create, edit, write, design, research - instead of searching for assets.
When trying to encourage adoption, earning buy-in from the people who will actually be using the platform on a regular basis is key to its success. But one overlooked group to involve is the executive sponsor. They will be looking to you for benchmarks and successes to share upstream. Give them this feedback! Deliver data like ROI and asset reports in non-technical language. Learn what will help them support future expansion of your project - sometimes as small an inclusion as adding executive headshots or the full set of historical company logos can earn you more champions, ones who control your budget.
But back to adoption, your frequent users will be the ones you need to convince that learning a new tool is worth their time. In some cases you will have a mandate (old system shutting down, required for legal reasons etc.), but often your team could continue saving files to their desktops or googling images. Plan to continue the conversation after launch, with any upgrade or new feature and with new colleagues. Find out what upcoming projects you can enhance by using the DAM (using search, metadata, naming, structure) to make the project run more smoothly or otherwise be successful. Use the (creative, organizational, process, marketing, writing) skills of your users to make the DAM project better in return. Document, schedule regular conversations and be open to learning better solutions together and you will have a DAM that is valuable enough to adopt.