The Municipality of Moerdijk makes full use of its Brand Portal or rather, its “Huisstijlportaal,” as they call it. In this article, Mirjam Bijleveld, Communications Advisor at Moerdijk, explains how they leverage the different modules.
Filling and Maintaining the Mediabank
Moerdijk used the implementation of their Brand Portal as an opportunity to completely overhaul their outdated image bank. Two colleagues from the communications team reviewed all the old photos, added keywords, updated copyright information. In short: they cleaned everything up.
Mirjam advises: “Start with a solid base and expand gradually. In my experience, properly filling an image bank takes time, but it pays off enormously. The time you invest now will save you twice as much later because managing media becomes so easy. Outdated images or those with expired model releases can be archived or deleted in just a few clicks. Adding the right keywords ensures colleagues can quickly find what they need. The system also shows which search terms are being used, giving you as an administrator valuable insight into what people are looking for and whether the portal’s content meets those needs.”
The Mediabank is also great for municipality-specific material. Mirjam explains: “For certain images, like those of the mayor, you want to control where they’re used. We place those in a restricted folder accessible only to specific colleagues.”
“The same goes for historical images, such as former aldermen: you want to keep them in your archive but prevent them from being used actively. With proper tags, expiration dates, rights, and quitclaims, you can easily manage the transition of the municipal executive every four years. It’s ideal to have all these things centralized in one place.”
Want to learn more? Check out our tips for successfully launching a Brand Portal at a municipality.
Newsletter Module: also for one-off mailings
“When you think of a Brand Portal, you think of creating materials. But our Huisstijlportaal offers much more than just the Mediabank and templates. It includes handy tools we use all the time: like a QR code generator and a URL shortener. You can even track clicks on shortened URLs, which is super useful! And it’s great to have everything centralized in one place.” That central hub is the ‘Do It Yourself’ section, where employees can easily create communication materials using templates for both online and offline use.
“The Newsletter module is one of the most-used features in our portal. You build the layout using flexible components: text blocks, images, white space, and so on. This lets you create exactly the layout you need, depending on how much information you want to include. At the same time, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time because you can reuse previous layouts. The module also works perfectly for one-off mailings. For example, we used it for a campaign where residents could request a free kitchen bin for organic waste. People signed up with their email address on our website, and then we easily sent them a personalized pickup voucher with a unique code via the Newsletter module. Super handy and efficient and safe and secure too. The module’s reporting shows how many emails were delivered and opened, so you know everything is working and reaching the recipient, which is also important.”
Preventing incorrect image use
Mirjam continues: “As a municipality, we also use many Office templates in our brand style, like Word reports or PowerPoint presentations. With the ID Office add-in, you can easily insert an image from the Mediabank into those Office files. This makes it simple to use brand-compliant images in presentations and other documents.”
“Correct image use is great for a consistent look, but it also prevents a lot of trouble. How often does a colleague unknowingly grab an image from the internet without checking copyrights? I think every municipality has had issues with that. Or you see a photo in a presentation with a stock photo watermark still on it? You can never completely prevent this, but if you set up a well-stocked Mediabank that’s accessible in just a few clicks, you significantly reduce the risk of incorrect image use.”
Interested in the full story from Moerdijk? Read the case study to learn how they made their brand easy to find and apply consistently.