The James Beard Foundation’s mission is to celebrate, nurture and honor chefs and other leaders in food culture – and one of the best ways to do that is with visual storytelling.
In our latest on-demand webinar, go behind the scenes with Content Manager Maggie Schoenfarber to learn how this team uses visual content across business initiatives – from engaging followers on Instagram to honoring culinary excellence at the James Beard Awards.
Watch now to learn:
- Why the James Beard Foundation invests in visual storytelling
- How visual storytelling impacts fundraising, sponsorship, communications, etc.
- The ROI of a fast, simple creative workflow
All Your Questions Answered
You had some fantastic questions for Maggie – listen to the last few minutes of the webinar to hear her answers, or read through a few of them below! Plus, be sure to tweet any followup questions @psforbrands.
What does your leadership team value, and how does PhotoShelter fit into that puzzle?
I think what they really care about is the performance at the end of the day. They were looking at, how can we grow our audience? We have a really big audience who looks at us during the award season, how can we retain some of that cohort? And so for us, it was, how can we do our work best to make sure that we can continue to achieve the performance goals? And PhotoShelter is a big part of that because it became a central point for us to deal with all of these requests that we were getting. It was about minimizing time spent looking for things. Our sponsors are increasingly looking for social deliverables – that’s really important to them. Having the visual assets in an easily accessible place – especially with the new FileFlow app – means that we can easily deliver on sponsor requests. That helps us, too, reformulate our contracts with sponsors and partners in the future.
How do you hire contract photographers and keep style consistent? Any tips?
It’s really tough. We’ve had an interesting transition for that. We were working with a group of entirely volunteer photographers, and as we moved into more digital content, we reevaluated our program and image use rights. We started a contract photography program three years ago. A lot of it is word-of-mouth and just reviewing a lot of photographers and being really specific with them about what you need. I’ve been fortunate to have photographers who are open to constructive criticism, and I have seen photographers adapt and improve as they continue to work with us.
Are you using PhotoShelter for videos as well as photo content?
We are. We started working with a new production company for the awards, which has the most video content of any of our programs, and having PhotoShelter made a huge difference for us. They are remote – they’re based in Chicago – and we were getting different cuts from them and getting to keep track of where those cuts were and what stage it was at, and being able to share it easily with other colleagues was really important.
Want all the answers? This is just a start! Skip to 35:20 in the video above to go straight to the full Q&A.
