Girls Academy Gets Content to 30k Players with PhotoShelter

Girls Academy has a national story to tell

Girls Academy is the premier female youth development soccer league in the United States, dedicated to empowering young women ages 13 to 19. 

With 11 national conferences, 130 clubs, and over 30,000 athletes, the Girls Academy team had thousands of stories to share but no system to scale their marketing content and make a bigger impact.

The challenge: Great moments were getting lost 

When Director of Marketing Eric SanInocencio first started with the Girls Academy, he and his team only used 10% of the content they shot for social media, while the rest remained untouched. They didn’t have a reliable library and distribution platform to deliver content to the league, the teams, and the athletes.

• The team couldn’t find its own content. “My first task was, ‘Where is our content?’ It was in so many different places that I didn’t even know existed,” Eric explained. Content was scattered across Google Drives, hard drives, and other unknown places. A lack of a centralized system made it hard to reuse content, tell player stories, or understand what the league already had.
• Content wasn’t delivered to the players and families. After a match, athletes wanted the photos and videos from the field, but Girls Academy didn’t have a reliable way to deliver that content after events. “I can’t tell you as a parent how many times my son or daughter will come off the field and be like, hey, did you get my play? Or did you get my goal? Or did you get pictures of me?” explained Eric.  
• Getting content to clubs was a broken system. As Eric put it, “I think the youth sports space in general just struggles with this, because it’s fragmented.”  Even when Girls Academy had content to share, they didn’t always reach the clubs that could put them to use. Some teams have coaches or parents handling social media, so it still wasn’t always getting to the right person. 

“We had no organization. And when I say no, I mean none. [Content] was in Google Drives and other people’s hard drives.”

– Eric SanInocencio, Director of Marketing, Girls Academy

The solution: A better game plan for finding and sharing photos

The Girls Academy’s photos and videos were scattered, and players and families had no consistent way to get a steady stream of content. Now, the team uses PhotoShelter to keep content in one place, share event galleries, and see which clubs are putting those images to use.

• One library helps the whole team find and tell a story. Girls Academy organizes event photos and videos in PhotoShelter by year, event, competition level, and team. Eric can find an athlete’s early photos as a part of her journey, while the social, video, and creative teams can access content for their own work. “Because of PhotoShelter, I can look in the library and go find content of them. We can tell a story of them back when they first started, and be able to show them now.”
• Club logos give the team another way to search. Girls Academy shared its clubs’ logos and crests with PhotoShelter so LogoID, one of PhotoShelter’s AI tools, can help identify teams in photos. “We actually had to use logos as a creative way to think through that process,” Eric said. Searching by club helps narrow the images the team needs to review.
• Players and families can find photos from their events. Girls Academy creates a public gallery for each event, giving players and parents a place to search for and download images. “We’ll create a content gallery for each event within PhotoShelter itself. And then [players and parents] can search through and find and download from there for free, allowing us to create a wonderful digital memory for those participants.”
• Analytics show which clubs are looking for content. Eric uses PhotoShelter’s Analytics to check search terms and see when downloads rise around an event. Those patterns help the team understand what clubs want and plan future outreach. “I love looking at the search terms. What this tells me is which teams are using the content.”
• Selected content goes directly to players. “We use PhotoShelter’s content distribution platform for some of our top players,” Eric explains. He says the athletes can “take those photos and tell their story and share with their communities about their journey.”

“PhotoShelter is the central hub for every member of our team.” 

– Eric SanInocencio, Director of Marketing, Girls Academy

What’s next: Faster access to content with dedicated hubs for every club

Parents and players are constantly asking when they can get content from each tournament. Eric wants to build on that interest by making it easier for clubs to find content of their own teams. He’s exploring if each club could have a dedicated space within the Girls Academy portal, with relevant content gathered there for players, families, and club staff to share.

“Now our girls, every time they play in a tournament, their parents will ask me, [do] you know, when’s the photo gallery coming out? We’ve got to think about how do we take that from this large scale and individualize it, maybe for regions, conferences, and or clubs.”

– Eric SanInocencio, Director of Marketing, Girls Academy

Girls Academy keeps the story moving beyond the field

The Girls Academy League can now find photos from past events and get new ones to the players and families who want them. Families have moments to keep, and athletes have images they can share as they tell the story of their soccer journey.

“PhotoShelter has been the biggest driver of success outside of our channels that we’ve had the entire time I’ve been here. This is a pivotal time for the Girls Academy to use its storytelling to really push the brand forward, and there’s not a single tool that we have that does that better than PhotoShelter.”

– Eric SanInocencio, Director of Marketing, Girls Academy