How does your team’s tech stack stand up against all of the projects and goals you have planned for the year ahead?
A cohesive set of tools makes a world of a difference.
Working as a creative in college athletics presents a specific set of challenges. Game-time decisions are at the forefront of the creative process. Interactions with thousands of students, faculty and alumni are at its core. It’s always exciting to hear about the innovative solutions these schools come up with over time, in order to make collaboration that much easier.
During The PhotoShelter Summit, Craig Bisacre, Director of Photography for Texas A&M Athletics, walked us through his team’s creative process, and displayed each essential part of their streamlined workflow.
Let’s take a closer look at how this team communicates internally, shares and delivers their photos, organizes their media library and amplifies their content with five of their go-to tools and applications…
Related Content: The Strategy Behind Texas A&M’s Photography and Social Media [Webinar]
5 Tools That Power Texas A&M Athletics’ Creative Workflow
Trello
Effective project management is essential for a creative team with many moving parts. Craig and his team use Trello to break up their projects and assignments into clear-cut categories and content buckets. This way, they’re able to take a step back and look at what’s coming up, who is involved, and how each team member can take the necessary steps to move things forward.
Slack
Clear communication is key if you want to produce, review and share content in a timely manner. For athletics of any kind, moving quickly is important for optimal fan engagement.
Craig and his team use Slack (we do too!) to pass along files and communicate with their social media and design teams. It’s a great tool if you want to divvy up your messages into specific group chats, with different professional purposes.
Once game day or event photos are up in PhotoShelter, Craig can let his team know with a quick Slack message. From there, designers can edit the images and ping the group again with an update. Then the social team can take what they need and share their posts in a flash.
Related Content: 5 Fun and Functional Ways to Use Slack to Build Company Culture
Did you know you can integrate your PhotoShelter library with your Slack Workspace? When you connect PhotoShelter and Slack, you can get real-time notifications when new content is added to your media library. You’ll be able to move content faster, make your creative team’s work more visible to colleagues across the organization, and save your team’s time when they’re looking for the latest content in your media library.
INFLCR
The benefits of influencer marketing and brand advocacy cannot be overstated. Sharing immediate access to photos and video with athletes, coaches, and other stakeholders is truly a game changer for teams who want to distribute content far and wide.
With a simple upload to PhotoShelter and an integration with INFLCR, an array of individual athletes can be notified about new images. Craig and his creative team use INFLCR to bypass text message requests for photos as they automatically move files from their media library to the hands of anyone who needs them.
This is huge for the NIL market too, as student athletes can easily use content from the university athletics program to build a fan base and grow their own personal brands. With INFLCR’s mobile app, student athletes get real-time access to content from the institution’s media staff and partners. Plus, personalized metrics make it easy to track follower growth, engagement and the overall progress of their growing brand.
Related Content: Name, Image, and Likeness: 7 Brands Reshaping the NIL Market
PhotoShelter
“PhotoShelter is our bread and butter.”
Craig Bisacre
With PhotoShelter as the primary hub for all of Texas A&M Athletics’ visual content, they can properly archive and organize every season and every calendar year they cover.
Their robust library includes game day galleries, folders for specific athletes, seasons, practices, media days and more. Plus, a ton of their staff across photo, social and design have access to all of these files – in their office, on the sidelines, or on-the-go.
Craig mentioned two types of users on their PhotoShelter account, and we love hearing about the different ways people use our tools:
- The ones who know the media library like the back of their hand, quickly searching for photos using precise keywords.
- And the ones who aren’t as involved in the file and folder structure, who enjoy exploring the rich archive of incredible photos to find what they need.
Here’s a closer look at their team’s Library and how it all comes together:
Photo Mechanic
We’re big fans of Photo Mechanic. For over a decade now, we’ve partnered with the team at Camera Bits to integrate with their “instant classic” tool for photographers.
It’s a powerhouse tool made for editing, organizing, captioning and transmitting images.
One of the best features for Craig and his team… hot codes, which are essentially shortcuts that assist with code replacement in order to streamline the process of adding metadata to your files. Ultimately, this allows for quick keywording so that all of the photos are easily searchable.
It’s a game changer for any team working with a ton of photos and the huge undertaking of adding keywords and metadata to all of those files.
Related Content: The Guide To Visual Storytelling Strategy for Schools & Universities
Want to see how different brands and creative teams work their marketing and photography magic? The entire PhotoShelter Summit, including Craig from Texas A&M Athletics’ full presentation, is available on-demand!
Watch 10+ inspiring sessions with industry leaders from brands like the Los Angeles Rams, Villanova, Slate, Hashtag Sports and more…
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