Victorian Department of Health enhances creative efficiency with Canto

The department is responsible for organising flagship initiatives such as the annual Public Healthcare Awards and the Victorian Health Summit, as well as critical public health campaigns like flu vaccination drives, bushfire preparedness, and mosquito-borne disease prevention.

The Creative Services team within the department plays a vital role in supporting these initiatives by producing high-quality visual assets, videos, and branding materials that drive engagement and support behaviour-change outcomes.

The Challenge

As the Head of Creative Services at Vic Health, Matt Harnett leads a dynamic team responsible for designing impactful campaigns, events, and public health initiatives. The team previously relied on SharePoint to store and manage its extensive library of digital assets, including images, videos, and graphics. While secure, SharePoint proved cumbersome for browsing and searching assets, lacked robust indexing capabilities, and created barriers for external stakeholders who required access to assets. The inefficiencies caused bottlenecks, requiring Matt and his team to manually retrieve assets, costing them valuable time and reducing overall productivity.

Being a health department, we run a lot of public health campaigns. And so it's really important that the assets for those campaigns can be shared, can be downloaded by organisations like councils or hospitals or health sector stakeholders.

The Solution

To address these challenges, Matt spearheaded the adoption of Canto, a digital asset management (DAM) platform, for Victoria Department of Health. Drawing from his prior experience with DAM platforms, including Canto, Matt selected it for its user-friendly interface, customisability, competitive pricing, and compliance with Australian data privacy standards.

A standout feature that has transformed workflows is Canto’s Portals functionality. This allows Vic Health to create branded, interactive portals for sharing assets seamlessly with external partners such as local councils, hospitals, and other stakeholders. This streamlined asset sharing has eliminated the reliance on manual file-sharing services and fostered a more professional and efficient way of working.

The Results

Since implementing Canto, the department has experienced significant benefits:

Canto Portals is just a real game changer for us, it's incredibly helpful being able to share content and assets so easily and seamlessly and in such a professional-looking environment with our stakeholders.

Time savings

Improved efficiency

“Every time someone asks: Matt, do we have an image library? I can say - yes, yes we do.“

Enhanced collaboration

External partners can now easily access assets through Canto’s portals, streamlining collaboration on campaigns and events.

In addition, sharing assets via Canto has elevated the department’s reputation by providing stakeholders with a polished and user-friendly experience.

Local partner

The responsive and insightful assistance from databasics not only enhanced operational efficiency but also provided Council with the tools to maintain compliance and manage their assets securely. Communications Advisor David Huang:

databasics has been really helpful, providing detailed training for me and my team. Also great to have a vendor always reaching to see how we are doing and how we could improve our usage.

What's next

Over the next year, the Victorian Department of Health aims to focus on building a comprehensive and robust digital asset library, particularly emphasising images and photographs. Currently, the department has a solid foundation with a collection of a few hundred high-quality images, along with various b-roll clips and movie segments, all of which it owns outright.

Recognising the potential to expand this repository, the team plans to import a broader range of imagery and videos to diversify the library and better support campaigns, projects, and stakeholder needs.

The goal is to create a rich, centralised resource that enables teams to access impactful visuals easily and ensures that all content is designed to deliver maximum effectiveness and cut-through in their communication efforts.