SIDEARM Sports + PhotoShelter: The Fastest Sports Marketing Workflow

College sports teams need to engage their fans and recruits in a flash. Whether your star running back just scored a touchdown or a top recruit just signed on with your team, you need a way to share photos of that moment as quickly as possible.

That’s why we’ve teamed up with SIDEARM Sports, the #1 provider of college athletics websites. Now, teams that use both PhotoShelter for Brands and SIDEARM can instantly move content from PhotoShelter to their athletics websites by SIDEARM.

“The integration of PhotoShelter and SIDEARM is a game-changer for us,” says Nicole Leusink, Assistant Director for Athletics Communications at Iowa State University. “Working in the fast-paced world of athletics, we are always looking for ways to improve our product and this will allow us to deliver content to our fans more efficiently.”

This integration is the first of its kind. No other digital asset management platform and content management system have come together to combine the benefits of both systems for their clients.

Now, college athletic departments will be able to streamline how they share content when news is breaking and on a daily basis.

“As far as our workflow, the integration will benefit us when it comes to our day-to-day tasks and story/image uploading by helping us to find the photo and upload it at a much faster pace,” explains Nicole.

Right now, her team isn’t using a real-time photo delivery workflow, but she adds that pairing an FTP photo workflow with this new integration would be a game-changer.

“If we ever made the switch, it would dramatically change how we do our photo galleries and the speed at which we finish our postgame work requirements,” says Nicole.

Everything You Need to Know About the Integration

Ingest content in real time, from anywhere.

PhotoShelter supports multiple upload methods for photos and videos, including mobile apps, direct wireless FTP via professional cameras, drag and drop web uploads and integrations with common editing tools like Lightroom and Photo Mechanic. This helps clients centralize all of their content and take action as quickly as possible, so they can share it with their fans in real time. Now, this last step of the process is lightning-fast, because all of that content is available within your CMS.

Browse your PhotoShelter library within SIDEARM.

You can easily browse your PhotoShelter library within SIDEARM. Navigate through your collections and galleries as usual, and choose photos to add to your website. No need to download them to your computer. You can also preview them before you hit, “Add to Site.”

Search your PhotoShelter library within SIDEARM.

The quick search functionality of PhotoShelter and this new integration with SIDEARM are a match made in heaven. Now, you can run a lightning-fast search through your team’s entire visual media library to find just the photo you’re looking for, without having to leave the SIDEARM interface.

You can also search within a gallery. Navigate to a gallery (say, a gallery of photos from a fan festival or today’s game), then type in a keyword to find exactly what you need.

Edit photos on the fly.

Once you’ve added a photo to your site, you can edit it in SIDEARM as usual. You can change the title, the caption, the Alt text and the credit information. Plus, you can resize, crop and rotate the photo. Don’t worry – any changes you make will not affect the metadata on the original file in your PhotoShelter account.

The Right Tools for Fast Visual Storytelling

Take one look at the Cyclones’ homepage and you can see that Nicole and her team at Iowa State are committed to visual storytelling.

“The world of sports communications has rapidly changed over the last few years with the growth of social media,” says Nicole. “Our audience no longer prefers a plethora of information, but they’d rather consume information visually.”

This fast-paced social media environment inspired Nicole’s forward-thinking team to focus on their workflow behind the scenes, which included moves to both PhotoShelter and SIDEARM.

Learn about the benefits of both straight from Nicole:

“This is our first year with both platforms and I think they both have great advantages.

As far as PhotoShelter, it really has helped us to get a handle on our photos and keep them organized and easily available. I feel PhotoShelter has more options than other systems currently on the market, and I appreciate how the photos are both accessible by many and yet protected at the same time.

With SIDEARM, the options are endless and our website is easy to use from a working standpoint. And if we ever experience a website glitch, nothing beats the customer support. Their speed and willingness to solve a problem is unmatched.

What is appealing about these two platforms is that they both are very innovative and not looking to just be content with the product we have. They are always looking for ways to improve and grow, which benefits their clients.”

The Takeaway

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us. We can’t wait to see how your team uses this new integration to streamline your workflow!