One Firefly boosts team empowerment and client-facing polish

Challenge

At One Firefly, every day brings a new push for content creation. From web design and blog writing to developing new content strategies for fresh clients, the team at One Firefly is constantly juggling a slew of creative assets and working to produce the most polished digital personas for their customers.

Historically, One Firefly's digital team hosted all assets on an internal VPN, sending archaic server paths to team members as they worked through a project. Frustrated by a slow and tedious connection, they then moved to Dropbox, but found that much of their work was getting lost in unmanageable folder systems. Whether they were sorting through a new client's collection of assets, trying to source already-produced blog content around a given topic, or attempting to share their sales portfolio with prospects, each team member spent an average of 5 hours a week alone searching for assets. And with so much disorganization came frequent internal asks about where something might be. "That's a lot of time you can't get back as an organization," says John Baskerville, One Firefly's Director of Product. "And it's not the best use of leadership's time to field those questions."

"There was no consistency. No reliability. There was no 'here's everything we created in the past, and here's every good example,'" recalls John. "We were hunting for things we knew we had but could not find."

As the team scaled, too, the organizational issues compounded. Kendall Clark, Head of Web, saw team frustrations begin to domino. John and Kendall knew that in order to boost productivity, maintain high morale, and maximize scalability, their asset management solution required an overhaul. "Brandfolder is just one of those tools that we needed to have," says Kendall.

Solution

John turned to Brandfolder to streamline the workflows of One Firefly's internal teams, and to ensure that external partners — clients and manufacturers — participate in seamless and timely collaborative processes. With the implementation of Brandfolder, Kendall's web team can autonomously build custom marketing experiences for their clients, boost brand integrity, and expedite their go-to-market strategy.

One Firefly capitalizes on robust Brandfolder features like:

• Share links, so that clients can drag and drop all requested assets into Brandfolder without any offline back and forth
• Custom and co-branded collections, majorly distinguishing themselves as an agency with professional polish and a client-first mentality
• Auto-sizing and video versioning, to empower internal teams to be self-sufficient and maintain brand consistency

Results

Since implementing Brandfolder, John and Kendall have noticed a massive change in team empowerment. "Before, they avoided Dropbox, they complained about Dropbox, and they did everything they could to get in and out," remembers Kendall. "The team is now much more excited to contribute and generally just happier. Efficiency has increased."

The minute I gave my team the link to Brandfolder, I heard them clicking around and navigating it themselves, because they found it to be so intuitive already. I had to be like 'stop, don't touch your computers, we'll go through it together!' But you could tell the minute they got in there, it was easy for them to find the things they needed.

And for newer content creators, that empowerment and efficiency stems from Brandfolder's ability to serve as an educational gold mine. "If one of our writers is tackling a topic they haven't written about before, they can search Brandfolder for any article including that topic or language, and learn from how other writers have approached the subject," says John. Team members are more engaged in the conversation around asset usage, too, and interested in leveraging all the assets they have—conversations John says "were absolutely not happening prior to having Brandfolder."

Brandfolder has also provided a robust foundation for maximizing brand visibility and the acquisition of new clients. The sales team can now easily demonstrate what One Firefly brings to the table. "It's like night and day," says John.

Plus, Brandfolder's intuitive platform interface and polished UX strengthens those client relationships. Clients used to get hung up on how they'd share large portfolios of important collateral with One Firefly, but they now use Brandfolder seamlessly. Frustrations are quelled, delays in revenue generation are eliminated, and One Firefly is able to maintain incredible 30% YoY agency growth.

And for manufacturers, revamped assets and updated product interfaces are constantly being released. Brandfolder has made it tremendously easy to source the "latest and greatest" without having to go back to a manufacturing rep, an update to the One Firefly process John considers "a huge relief."

We saw this as an investment," says John. "This was an investment in ourselves, in our organization, and in our people.

Key Takeaways

• Internal team members save 5 hours a week to focus on the client-focused work that matters
• Newly-released manufacturer assets and product interfaces are instantly available in their most up-to-date forms
• Easy collaboration and portfolio customization has streamlined and strengthened client relationships, boosting revenue generation and agency growth
• Agency team members are happier and more productive because they spend less time on administrative back and forth

Interested in learning how Brandfolder can help you manage, distribute and analyze your brand assets?