Global Heritage Fund Case Study

When you try to describe the impact of the Global Heritage Fund, words alone fall short. The nonprofit organization repairs heritage sites that are in need of intervention in developing regions around the world. They take cultural sites on the brink of ruin and restore them in a way that makes sense, for local industry, educational ventures, or tourism.

As a nonprofit that depends on donors to fulfill its mission, the Global Heritage Fund must showcase its work in a way that is relatable, intuitive, and appealing. They know that people donate based on emotional reasoning – because they feel supporting a cause is the right thing to do, not as a result of a moral quarrel.

“Imagery really goes hand-in-hand with what we’re doing, so when you can show a building being destroyed, and you can put an image to it, it’s real in a way that words are not.”

— Matthew Strebe. Global Heritage Fund’s Director of Operations

Content and visual storytelling have always been at the center of how Global Heritage Fund presents its mission, however like many nonprofit organizations during the Covid-19 pandemic, Global Heritage Fund was forced to rethink how it engaged with donors. Due to travel restrictions that disallowed organization staff and donors from directly interfacing with the communities they serve and support, the GHF team pivoted and explored new content creation and distribution strategies.

Nada Hosking, Global Heritage Fund’s Executive Director explains how she and her team knew they needed to step up. They decided to shift focus by creating animated, moving content to stop readers and engage them, covering more universal subject matters like how food brings cultures together.

“You know, food is what unites people, food is part of cultures, food is what makes us understand other cultures, so I think just looking at a static site and thinking about the preservation of the built heritage is not enough. We need to also go beyond that and look at all of these beautiful things that people around these places are producing and changing as well.”

— Nada Hosking, Global Heritage Fund’s Executive Director

Key Highlights

• More targeted campaigns with a focus on active visual content to engage and continue supporting each community and location they work to preserve.
• Improved collaboration for the creation of visual content across 28 heritage sites in 19 countries around the world.
• Website visits have increased two-fold from about 4-5,000 visits per month to 8-10,000.

The Challenge

• Improve engagement with donors through visual content, to support the communities that need help.
• Collaboration with stakeholders for content creation across their different heritage sites worldwide.
• Encourage donors and other visitors to travel to their heritage sites, often in remote locations, to see the organization’s projects in person.

How We Help

The Results

• PhotoShelter provides a centralized image library that’s searchable, with fast and easy access for Global Heritage Fund to store, organize and share all their visual content with their stakeholders across their heritage sites.
• Having increased productivity and better collaboration when working on donor campaigns worldwide.
• Improvement of website visitor experience with the use of impactful visual content. For website maintenance, Matthew Strebe uses PhotoShelter for Brands as his digital asset management system and keeps the library open in the background when he edits images so he can easily look for alternatives or locate the original and start over.