Case Study — ResourceSpace + Northern Forest Center

Photo credit: Kennedy Shea Productions

Working across northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York, the Northern Forest Center is an innovation and investment partner whose work is rooted in community, forest stewardship and economic development.

It is the only nonprofit delivering integrated, cross-state solutions in the region, helping rural places and people thrive across a 30 million acre area of forest land. Suffice to say, staying on top of all the visual content being created by the Center’s teams on the ground was a challenge.

As Program Manager, Isabella Ronson-Amrein is part of the team responsible for telling the story of the work Northern Forest Center does, and this involves creating content for their website, social media channels, email marketing, video and large fundraising campaigns. 

However, up until 2023 when they implemented ResourceSpace, the Center was relying on a simple network drive to manage their digital assets.

“We had a network drive which was as clunky as you can possibly imagine”

“We have a team that’s spread across the region, but it was really difficult for people to access our shared drive and upload images to it,” recalls Isabella.

“It wasn’t intuitive at all, had no real functionality to speak of, and very difficult to find stuff once it was on there—you had to know exactly where something was to be able to find it.”

It was even more challenging when the Center needed to produce large design projects for print campaigns.

“We’d get photos from a photographer, put it into the old system or Box, which then had to be filtered through to be shared elsewhere. There was a lot of moving files from place to place, system to system,” says Isabella.

“Basically, it was very old school and as clunky as you can possibly imagine.”

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“ResourceSpace offered everything we wanted to achieve at a price point that worked for us”

With this in mind, Northern Forest Center began a process of finding a Digital Asset Management system that could resolve their challenges within their nonprofit budget.

“Having a team spread out across the region it was important to find a way we could share files easily and know where assets were and get them to use them,” says Isabella.

“We looked at a few DAM vendors, but ResourceSpace was by far the best solution and clearly provided the best value.

“It offered everything we wanted to achieve at a price point that worked for us.”

“ResourceSpace makes everything super easy.”

Three years (at the time of writing) into Northern Forest Center’s ResourceSpace journey, having a dedicated DAM system in place has transformed how they manage, access and share their valuable visual assets.

“ResourceSpace has made all of the elements of the digital asset workflow that used to be difficult super easy,” states Isabella.

“Everything is in one place now, and we can set different access permissions for different users, while sharing with external users—which was really challenging—can now be achieved without showing everything to everyone.

“Ultimately, this supports our collaboration on the work we do and allows everyone to contribute, because we have all of the information for each asset available to us when we need it.”

The ResourceSpace implementation came at a really important time for Isabella and the team, as they were significantly expanding the work they did around housing in the region. Fortunately, with the help of the ResourceSpace team, they were able to build the system in advance of that, so everything went into it organised from day one.

“We were scaling up our model quite a bit when ResourceSpace came in, but the platform was able to absorb that growth and set us up for success.”

“The best customer service we’ve received from any of our platforms by miles”

Northern Forest Center worked closely with their account manager to ensure the system’s implementation could support this important stage of their growth, and Isabella has continued to be wowed by ResourceSpace’s’s customer service ever since.

“Kerry [the Center’s account manager] and the ResourceSpace team have delivered, by far, the best customer service we’ve received from any of our platforms by miles,” says Isabella.

“They’ve been absolutely fantastic over the last few years, and Kerry regularly emails us to check-in and help us with system updates, while also helping us to utilise new features.”

The Long-term Case Study Series: Friends of the Earth & ResourceSpace

ResourceSpace was created to be the Digital Asset Management system for Oxfam, and since then we have established ourselves as one of the most popular DAM platforms for charities and non-profits.

To find out more about why we’re trusted by the likes of Northern Forest Center, UNICEF, Tearfund, Fairtrade and more, book a discovery call with a ResourceSpace specialist today by following the link below.