Gillette Children’s Cures Media Management Headaches with PhotoShelter

A Visual Story Waiting to be Told

Gillette Children’s provides specialized care for children with disabilities. Their mission is to deliver comprehensive innovative medical care to every child. To tell their story and connect with the community, Gillette’s Marketing and Communications team captures powerful images and videos every day. Gillette needed a solution to improve the management and distribution of their visual assets to support their mission and enhance communication efforts.

The Challenge: A Growing Content Library Brings Growing Pains

Andy Underwood-Bultmann, Multimedia Producer, and Nick Hanson, Public Affairs and Media Relations Manager, are two Gillette team members who frequently capture and share impactful visuals that showcase Gillette’s work. Their daily tasks involve telling Gillette’s story and mission to external and internal audiences, which usually requires photographing and filming patients and families, events and hospital facilities and distributing these assets to various stakeholders.

The team was struggling with organizing and sharing their growing library of media content. Nick said, “We just didn’t have a good archive system before PhotoShelter… If Andy is going to go out and take these amazing photos, if we don’t have a place where they can live and breathe and be used again and repurposed, then it’s not a good use of our time, energy, and efforts.”

• Photos scattered everywhere. The team lacked a single, organized platform to store their visual assets. “We needed something that was easily accessible to everybody on our team – but also externally to media partners, media outlets, patients, and families, too,” explained Nick. With no central system, it was difficult to keep track of all the photos and videos.
• Sharing was a hassle. Sharing photos with corporate supporters such as Dairy Queen, Walmart or Ace Hardware was a challenge. It was also a challenge to get their multimedia assets to patients, families, providers and supporters. They needed a way to give people access to the right photos in a centralized place with a simple link. Nick emphasized, “It’s huge to be able to share those galleries with our partners who host events in the community or at the hospital.”
• Searching took forever. Finding a specific photo was a time-consuming process. “If we just want to run a search for ‘girl in a wheelchair,’ and we don’t have that tagged in all those images, we can get a great sampling,” said Andy Underwood-Bultmann, Multimedia Producer. They needed a better way to search for images, even if they weren’t perfectly tagged.

Using AI Visual Search, the team at Gillette Children’s can easily search for specific visuals and find instant results – no keywords or metadata necessary.

“Our old process was not as intuitive, useful, or easy to navigate and share. It was a real problem. So, the implementation of PhotoShelter was a big priority, and since it’s been utilized, it’s been a huge asset. It’s an extremely valuable tool in communication efforts.”

Nick Hanson, Public Affairs and Media Relations Manager, Gillette Children’s

The Solution: A Healthy Dose of Organization

Now, with PhotoShelter’s DAM in place, they enjoy seamless access, streamlined collaboration, and improved organization. Andy noted, “One of the biggest benefits is that within our team, a lot of people are creating social media assets or visual projects, and they’re able to interact with PhotoShelter and use it to find pictures themselves without our involvement at all.”

Here’s how PhotoShelter addressed their key challenges:

• Everything is organized in one place. Now, all of Gillette’s photos and videos are stored in PhotoShelter, making it easy for everyone to find what they need. “It’s just very user-friendly, and it allows a wider group of people to be able to access these images and work with them,” Andy shared.
• Sharing is simple and secure. PhotoShelter makes it easy to share photos with partners while still controlling who has access to what. “It’s great being able to send a full gallery to a vendor or a client that’s discrete, in terms of just wanting them to see a particular gallery,” Andy added.
• Finding the right photo takes seconds. PhotoShelter’s AI Visual Search helps the team find the right image quickly, even if it’s not tagged with specific keywords. Andy highlighted the AI’s usefulness: “We’re getting those results when we’re doing those searches. So those AI tools are super helpful.”

“PhotoShelter allows us to give people high-quality assets to use at their fingertips. It’s great being able to find the right image for the right project via the AI Visual Search. If you had a different model, a browsing model, or just static assets, it might be harder to find the right image for a particular project. So, I think what PhotoShelter does is it unites the most recent and best content with our creators. It’s that ease of access and that straight flow from creating it to being available to use it that allows people to have better content to work with.”

Andy Underwood-Bultmann, Multimedia Producer, Gillette Children’s

A Picture-Perfect Partnership

It’s clear that PhotoShelter has become more than just a software solution for Gillette Children’s —it’s become a partner in their mission. Taking the pain out of media management, PhotoShelter has freed up Gillette’s team to focus on what truly matters: those amazing kids.  No more wasted time searching for lost photos or struggling to share files. Now, with everything organized and easily accessible, they can channel their energy and creativity into telling impactful stories and connecting with their community.  It’s a win-win for everyone, especially the children and families at the heart of Gillette’s work.

“PhotoShelter is just a really good bridge between our creative team and our employees, our writers and content producers. It’s an easy-to-navigate database with some great assets to help enhance our brand and ease of use. It’s a great tool for any communications team in our industry.”

Nick Hanson, Public Affairs and Media Relations Manager, Gillette Children’s