How Rock City Church Automated Work for a 100-Person Team

Rock City Church centralizes content to empower its team

Since 2011, Rock City Church has grown from a single service in a movie theater to one of America’s fastest-growing churches. Today, it serves thousands across Central Ohio through multiple physical locations, prison campuses, and its community outreach arm, The Columbus Dream Center. This rapid growth created a massive visual media library, but the assets were scattered and inaccessible. With a staff of 100 people needing images, the church required a centralized, searchable system to manage its content and maintain brand consistency.

The challenge: Daily struggles finding and distributing content 

As the Lead Graphic Designer, Cory Wonderly is responsible for the church’s visual identity. When he started, the creative workflow was broken. Assets were disorganized, difficult to find, and locked away from the teams that needed them. 

• Files were scattered and disorganized. When Cory joined, there was no central source of truth for the church’s assets. “So when I arrived here, everything was everywhere,” Cory explains. “A lot of files were either on Dropbox or people’s computers.”
• Valuable time was wasted searching for assets. The “file dump” system directly impacted the team’s efficiency. Cory recalls, “We would be in meetings with our executive team, and someone would say, ‘I’m pretty sure there was a picture… and then we’d have to spend a whole day trying to find it.” There was no process for handling new photos and no metadata, making search nearly impossible.
• A large staff had no access to content. Rock City Church has a staff of about 100 people, many of whom rely heavily on images for their ministry work. The existing system was a significant problem, “Because all that content was hosted on platforms not everyone had access to,” explained Cory.

“There were no naming or photographer conventions, so everything was just kind of on its own. For our organization, the biggest challenge was finding pictures that could be referenced later for repeated use.” 

Cory Wonderly, Lead Graphic Designer, Rock City Church

The solution: A centralized, searchable, and user-friendly DAM

Rock City Church’s creative team went from spending entire days searching for files to instantly empowering their colleagues. By implementing PhotoShelter, they established a single source of truth that automated organization and simplified access for everyone.

Here’s how PhotoShelter transformed their workflow:

• Automation and self-service saved the creative team time. PhotoShelter’s FileFlow app allowed Cory to easily set up permissions and user groups, saving him “a ton of time from constantly handling requests through messages”. Now, staff can self-serve; instead of messaging Cory for a “worship picture,” they can simply “type and search”. Smart Galleries further automate organization by using keywords to pull photos of specific people, like staff members, into curated folders.

• Public galleries instantly connect the community with key moments. The church captures photos and videos of every baptism, and PhotoShelter makes sharing these memories seamless. “We create a public gallery that we can send out almost immediately, allowing people to capture that memory,” says Cory. Campus pastors can then email a direct link to the gallery, connecting people with their experience.
• Volunteer and contractor collaboration became simple and standardized. Rock City works with a team of contract and volunteer photographers who are all “contributors within PhotoShelter.” The team provides them with Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) on “how to upload and name their initial gallery.”
• Brand consistency improved dramatically across the organization. With everyone pulling from the same curated library, brand representation has become far more consistent. “There’s a lot less cell phone pictures being used,” Cory notes, which has been a “massive benefit.” The church’s high-quality, professional photography style is used across all social media and event promotions.

“FileFlow is user-friendly. Most people I see who use it don’t even go to galleries. They’re just typing in words, which is great. Instead of them messaging me asking for a worship picture from the service, they can just type and search. It’s been the most helpful in keeping a consistent brand presence on social media and events. We’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple years honing in on a photography style, and ensuring that people are always pulling from the right source also helps us a ton.” 

Cory Wonderly, Lead Graphic Designer, Rock City Church

Rock City Church now gets better ROI on creative

Rock City Church eliminated the daily pain points of its creative workflow. Internal discussions about back-end systems disappeared, replaced by a focus on ministry impact. With a central, searchable platform, their content is now used more frequently and effectively.

“Imagine you have an Apple photo gallery, but it’s completely searchable. Everyone on your team can access it at the same time from anywhere. It’s easy and it’s there. That’s PhotoShelter.”

Cory Wonderly, Lead Graphic Designer, Rock City Church