How MetroHealth Built One Trusted and Secure Brand Library With PhotoShelter

8,000 employees needed a better way to manage brand assets

MetroHealth is a leading public health system serving Northeast Ohio, with 8,000+ employees, five hospitals, four emergency departments, and more than a dozen health centers across Cuyahoga County. For more than 180 years, the organization has served the community through hospitals, trauma care, burn care, and local health centers.

With so many employees, locations, departments, and partners, MetroHealth needed a better way to manage the photos, logos, videos, and creative assets that represent its brand. 

The challenge: Brand assets were too hard to find and control

Kathy Walters, Brand Marketing Manager at MetroHealth, helps manage the brand assets that support campaigns, internal teams, departments, and external partners. Her team needs to make sure people can find the right files without using anything outdated or unapproved.

• Employees couldn’t tell which assets were approved. Kathy said, “There was no organization, there was no rhyme or reason as to why things were where they were, or updates as to what was the most current piece that they should be using.” 
• One person handled too many asset requests. Kathy explained, “One person was responsible for all of the brand assets related to MetroHealth.” That setup created delays for the people waiting on files and pressure for the person trying to keep up with every request.
• Teams lost time recreating work that already existed. When people couldn’t find past creative work, they often had to start over. Files from older campaigns, past projects, or former employees were hard to locate, even when they still had value. That wasted time and made it harder for the team to build from work they had already paid for.
  
• The library became harder to search as it grew. MetroHealth had thousands of images, but not every file had useful tags or metadata. Kathy said, “Probably three months after I joined, I realized that nobody was tagging anything.” The team knew good assets existed, but finding the right one quickly was still harder than it needed to be.

“Giving people complete free reign also didn’t work out very well, simply because they would select a wrong logo, or an image that we didn’t have the rights to use.”

Kathy Walters, Brand Marketing Manager, MetroHealth

The solution: Secure access to approved assets fast

Before PhotoShelter became MetroHealth’s central brand library, employees had to depend on shared folders, manual requests, and team members who already knew where files lived. Now, employees can find approved assets in one place, while the marketing team keeps control over what people can see and use.

• One trusted home for brand assets. Kathy said, “For us, PhotoShelter is our way to have one resource and one place for the truth about who the MetroHealth brand is and all the assets that support it.” That central source helps employees know where to go and which files they should use.

• Employees can find approved assets without waiting on marketing. PhotoShelter helps MetroHealth reduce one-off requests by giving more employees convenient access. “They don’t have to wait two days for us to get back to them. It’s instantaneous.” 
• Permissions help protect outdated or restricted files. Kathy explained, “I can still retain old images that should no longer be used, or logos, and file them in a way that only I or someone on my team has access to, but the rest of the system does not.” Flexible permissions help the team maintain their archive without the wrong assets getting reused.
• AI search helps the team find files faster. Kathy tells us, “We may have 16,000 images in our library, and by doing the search that I can with [AI Visual Search] and putting in different parameters. It helps narrow it down from 16,000 to maybe 100.” 
• More than photography. MetroHealth uses PhotoShelter for photos, video, campaign assets, legal documents, and photo releases. Kathy said, “We have our TV spot, and I am thinking about using PhotoShelter as a resource for all of our new campaign assets that we’re developing.” What started as a place for images has become the hub for brand and campaign management.

“What we’re trying to do is leverage PhotoShelter as a library for all of the assets that we’ve created. So that way, if somebody changes jobs or leaves the system, somebody new can search PhotoShelter and find something that was created two years ago, and we can use that as a starting point versus having to recreate something.”

Kathy Walters, Brand Marketing Manager, MetroHealth

MetroHealth now has a brand library built for speed, control, and trust

MetroHealth needed more than a place to store files. It needed a way to help thousands of employees find approved brand assets without slowing down the marketing team or putting the wrong files into use. And they found that all-in-one solution with PhotoShelter.

“It really serves as our brand library. It’s the one place where our teams can find the right logos, photos, videos, and creative assets. It has been a game changer and a lifesaver for me, because now everything is sorted and filed and labeled as it’s supposed to be.”

Kathy Walters, Brand Marketing Manager, MetroHealth