When the unforeseen global pandemic forced every person on earth to shelter in place, we were all were asked to audit, evaluate, and prioritize procuring and securing the necessities it would take to live a healthy life day-to-day: immune-boosting nutrients like vitamin c, paper goods, strong wifi, a supportive community or friend, essential medication refills, and income. However, as communities began reporting increased COVID-19-related fatalities within the first few weeks of the crisis, it became increasingly obvious that these ‘essentials’ weren’t available to most global citizens.
So, how did local communities survive? In some areas, concerned citizens connected on social media (and Slack!) to build mutual aid disaster-relief networks, but in most cases, national, international, and local non-profit organizations helped those in need thrive by procuring and providing both necessities and comforts to citizens of underserved communities.
On June 24th, join us at the 20/21 Vision: The Collaboration Summit by PhotoShelter to hear three nonprofit organizations that provide both essential and compassionate resources discuss how they collaborate internally and externally to create impact worldwide: gathering helpful resources, compiling data, and creating content that spreads impactful, pertinent stories in real-time to help heal hearts and save lives.
Learn more about the speakers and their organizations below and prep your questions now for the rapid-fire Q&A at the end of the session. Plus, invite your colleagues to register here.
Meet the Speakers
Beth Allen, Senior Communications Manager for Food for the Hungry and a 25-year career veteran of humanitarian aid work will kick off this session with a brief overview of the organization’s history and mission. In its 50th year, Food for the Hungry has recommitted to ending all forms of poverty by aiming to provide life-changing development programs, disaster relief, and advocacy to communities in need; so, naturally, central to their content strategy would be documenting and sharing critical stories. To help contextualize their content strategy, Beth will explain how she and her global team use PhotoShelter to upload, organize, and share all of their data and assets from one central place to many media and marketing partners, internally and externally, and how crucial immediate access is for securing dire resources.
As Beth puts it bluntly, “Food for the Hungry has used PhotoShelter to revolutionize the way we handle our workflow in marketing appeals. We’re able to share both images and even document files containing stories of the people we work with in over 20 countries, with outside consultants who raise money for our international humanitarian relief agency (who’s annual budget is upwards of $150 million).” Tune in to watch and learn how Beth and team have operationalized their content strategy to affect international relief impact at scale—saving precious work time and lives by collaborating effortlessly with tools that help.
Speaking of life savers — healthcare workers risked their lives over the past year supporting and saving us through this tragic pandemic and they deserve more than a sweet serenade of clapping. In the second segment, two marketing team leads from the University of Maryland Medical System—a healthcare system consortium of 11 external organizations will discuss their thoughtful and careful collaboration strategy for sharing assets with thousands of internal and external partners during COVID-19.
Linda Praley, creative director at UMMS, focuses on setting and maintaining brand strategy and standards, while director of creative communications, Mike Ruddock focuses on strategic organization and delivery of content creation and operations. They both lead in-house creative teams with a wide range of experts in branding, graphic design, art direction, video/photography, social media, script writing, and art direction who interdepartmentally collaborate to produce award-winning campaigns that capture audiences across platforms and they’ll discuss exactly how they differentiated their COVID-19 content strategy by focusing on stories of hope and resilience in their communities. In this session, you’ll learn firsthand how PhotoShelter enabled this team to develop a multi-organization campaign for the M&T Bank Stadium mass vaccination site, how they used Workspaces to organize, collaborate, and share assets with the state of Maryland, the National Guard, and the Stadium Authority, and how they guide the strategic development of other targeted and meaningful creative campaigns across a wide range of mediums.
To close this session, we’re honored to be joined by Sydnye White, Senior Director of Content and Storytelling at Special Olympics International. She is passionate about combining ideas, visuals and sound to create compelling content that helps people think differently about the world in which we all share. At Special Olympics, she is a dedicated storytelling advocate and ally for athletes with intellectual disabilities, developing content and stories that demonstrate how athletes with intellectual disabilities are change makers on and off the fields and courts, in their communities, countries and in the world! In this closing segment you’ll learn how she developed and implemented an international, multi-partner real-time asset creation and sharing strategy across time zones in 7 regions for the February 2020 Special Olympics Russia Invitational Games in Kazan, Russia.
If you’re already feeling curious and inspired, we have to warn you: the insights packed into this learning session could have lifetime effects on your career. Save your spot to 20/21 Vision: The Collaboration Summit by PhotoShelter to meet and learn from these four impact-driven content strategists, along with 15+ other brilliant creative professionals from brands you know and love.
