Digital Yalo enhanced collaboration and reduced costs by implementing Dropbox

Background

Digital Yalo is a 100% minority-owned, full-service agency that offers creative marketing campaigns, branding strategy, web design and development services. With north of 40 employees, the team is composed of problem-solvers, colorists, listeners, coaches, farmers, and musicians who draw inspiration from film, art, music, and sports to tap into real, human experiences to elevate a brand.

Challenge: Efficiency was at odds with their file storage system

From the beginning, Digital Yalo founder and CEO Arnold Huffman and his team prided themselves on taking a unique approach to client services, focusing on the effective and efficient delivery of products. 

Having experienced organic growth and a few small mergers and acquisitions, this became more important than ever. As the organization grew, that focus on efficiency was at odds with Digital Yalo’s cumbersome file storage and delivery system.

A creative agency like Digital Yalo can go from working on video assets to Word documents in a single day.

For years, all those documents and files lived on Huffman’s computer, but that system created a bottleneck as they hired more people and all documentation has to pass through the CEO. Multiple people needed access to the same documents, and they would all share information via email, where important details would get lost. 

“As we’ve grown, we’ve had to evolve our technology layer to enable that growth. That’s where Dropbox comes in,” Huffman says. 

Brandon Bradford, VP of Operations, led the push to create a process that would let everyone work independently while collaborating with external clients.

Solution: Seamless transition from platform to platform

Through the mergers they’ve had over the previous years, Digital Yalo had several decentralized collaboration platforms: Dropbox, Box, and Microsoft. In their quest to simplify and unify collaboration, Digital Yalo turned to Positive Results, a third-party seller and technology partner, to help them choose the right solution. 

Positive Results demoed multiple tools, including Google, Box and Dropbox. Before making the selection, it was criticalto understand the workflows that were most important totheir business operations. It boiled down to three primary functions. 

First, they needed to onboard new employees and provide access and permission to information critical to their business roles without the need for an IT professional. 

Second, as a marketing and strategy agency, they regularlycollaborate with clients. Private digital workspaces forclients which were easy to configure, manage and deploywere a top priority.

And last, they needed the ability to integrate their document storage solution with other applications they were already using. Dropbox was the tool that best met their business requirements.

“We recommended Dropbox because of our deep partnership, the flexibility of the platform, and our ability to migrate a terabyte of data in under a week from Box to Dropbox without interruption to daily productivity,” says Positive Results CEO Dennis Kyle. “We helped Digital Yalo design a complete strategy for system design, implementation strategy, technical migration and onboarding, and end user and admin training.

Dropbox also offered a file structure system that everyone at Digital Yalo found familiar, greatly reducing the learning curve to a new tool.

Allowing multiple people to access and edit documents in real-time, Digital Yalo no longer had to assemble updated documents from piecemeal edits sent through email. This improved collaboration, which was a huge time-saver. 

Today, each client has a shared folder with subfolders for internal staff, and a subfolder for files that can be shared with clients. Every single stakeholder can be assigned separate permissions and information can be shared with clients and the relevant service team. The team also uses Dropbox Sign to get the necessary signatures within their existing workflow, a vital step to eliminate approval bottlenecks as the team grows.

Digital Yalo makes use of Dropbox integrations with Asana, Smartsheet and Zoho. These integrations were implemented with the help of Positive Results.

When Digital Yalo acquired two smaller agencies, Ninja Multimedia and My Friend’s Nephew, they partnered once again with the Positive Results team to ensure the migration didn’t impact the day-to-day work of the Digital Yalo team. Together, they engaged in a significant information migration and incorporated everything for their unified brand in Dropbox.

Results: Move quickly and get more done

Moving from Box to Dropbox saved Digital Yalo about 57% in annual license fees. They also estimate a resource savings of 14% from time spent going back and forth between platforms and searching for updated document fragments.

As they continue to grow, Digital Yalo is confident that Dropbox offers them the efficiency they need to remain on top of client needs. “There’s always something coming,” Huffman says. “Our job is to be on top of that, and tools like Dropbox help us move quickly through collaboration.”

Ultimately, their success metric is team feedback. Dropbox has helped make everyone’s workflows simpler and seamless, enabling Digital Yalo staff to get to the soul of any brand faster than ever before.

“Dropbox is one of the collaboration tools that allows us to be in sync with clients,” Huffman says. “It lets us be effective and efficient in processing either deliverables or changes to those deliverables so we get to the end point or stick the landing sooner.”