Education First

Bynder x EF: At a glance

Situation
One of EF’s largest divisions, EF International Language Campuses (ILC), provides immersive language learning programs in 52 destinations around the globe. They are in the process of a digital transformation, focusing on improving efficiency and differentiating themselves from competitors.

Challenge
EF promotes its products using high-quality imagery and videos, which it needs to be able to deliver consistently across multiple departments and hundreds of offices and schools worldwide. Accessibility and visibility on key resources was an area for improvement that, if addressed, could increase productivity and reduce the repetition of simple tasks.

Solution
Bynder became EF’s ‘central source of truth’ for resources, enabling quick access and clear visibility to the right content across multiple markets and departments, while connecting with other vital tech tools—a huge leap forward for their digital transformation efforts.

Results
Key assets are now readily available via a self-service approach enabling various internal teams to get to market faster and eliminate duplicate photoshoots and image versions. A real time and resource saver, so EF can focus on facilitating education for those who need it most.

Situation

EF attracts a distinctive customer with a hunger to not just learn a language, but experience it too. The best way to communicate the experiences they offer is with rich media. With 612 schools and offices in more than 50 countries and over 50,000 staff and teachers, EF needed to provide open visibility on important assets and ensure they were used to their fullest potential.

Prior to Bynder, access to assets was through several different platforms on a storage server with a vast array of folders and subfolders—the largest of which contained over 700,000 assets.

Ultimately, EF needed a solution that could:

1. Provide visibility into what assets exist, or need to be produced
2. Empower an intuitive, self-service approach to accessing images and videos
3. Support the digital transformation strategy through strong, secure, and straightforward integrations with other important tools and systems

Challenges

A major role within the production team is the creation of ‘offline’ assets used for marketing purposes. These include brochures, flyers, posters, and photoshoot images. In order to provide these assets to other departments, the production team would send a large PDF showcasing all new imagery available. Then, any department, office or team who needed these assets would have to request them online, through an internal ticketing system.

Ultimately, the whole EF team needed to automate this process and enable wider visibility on company assets, making it easier to find and use content when it was needed for marketing activities.

When new people would start on the production team, it would take them a lot of time to familiarize themselves with the server by clicking around to find things. Only the team members that had been around for a year or more knew the server well enough to actually know where assets were located.

For continued success, EF is digitizing operations to bring content to market faster, onboard new team members quicker, while competing in a digital-first world by demonstrating the premium experience they provide.

Solution

Given their large size, with departments dispersed across various specialties and regions, EF needed Bynder to promote efficiency, visibility, and connectability to other systems and tools, ultimately helping to boost digital transformation efforts across the company.

Bynder x EF: Key benefits

EF’s approach to learning languages via immersion provides an unparalleled experience for learners, but at the same time it makes things more complex: different departments working on different offerings, each with their own unique needs. With the help of Bynder, EF can better showcase their learning experience by streamlining the process, visibility, and availability of rich media used across the globe.

Streamlining rich media production
Having one central source of truth for all rich media means a smoother process for requesting, finding, and managing versions—saving time for everyone.

Visibility and self-sufficiency across markets
Providing visibility into what’s available reduces duplicate work on photoshoots and edits, enabling departments to move faster and more self-sufficiently.

Connecting to key systems for digital transformation efforts
Digitizing processes and connecting Bynder to tools like their user generated content (UGC) engine and websites is helping to create efficiencies in multiple areas.

Optimized experiences with integrated technologies

Connectivity and digitization
Continuing their digital journey, EF plans to continue adding integrations with other systems in order to streamline their processes, such as connections to tools being used by the advertising, email, and website teams.

Rolling out across different markets with different branding needs
EF’s goal is to unify all markets and brands under the Bynder experience and make it digital and accessible for the entire organization.