Mater Dei High School Turns Campus Content Into A Shared Story

Mater Dei needed a better way to tell their student stories

Mater Dei High School is a private Catholic high school in Santa Ana, California, and part of the Diocese of Orange. The school serves about 1,850 students and celebrates 75 years as the oldest and largest Catholic high school in Orange County.

28 CIF sports, six club sports, student activities, admissions, advancement, and other departments are all creating content, but files were spread across dozens of programs, inboxes, and drives. Mater Dei needed a better way to bring everything together.

The challenge: Great content was everywhere, but hard to use

As Executive Director of Communications & Media Relations, Allison Bergeron and her team support athletics, admissions, advancement, philanthropy, student life, media relations, and the broader school brand.

The school had no shortage of great content. The problem was that too much of it lived in separate places, with separate teams, and in file formats the communications team could not always use.

• Content was spread across too many teams and programs. Each program wanted to tell its own story, making it hard for the central communications team to capture the big picture. Allison explained everyone still needed to align with the school’s institutional voice and brand. 
• The team lost time chasing images they couldn’t use. When Allison needed a specific photo for admissions, fundraising, magazines, ads, or donor communications, she often had to track it down by hand. When she did, the image might arrive through a text or email as a low-resolution file. “I would find myself stalled out trying to track down an image,” Allison said. “Someone would say, ‘I’ll text it to you,’ or ‘let me email it to you,’ and then it’s low-res or blurry.” 
• Valuable school-owned content was getting buried after first use. Mater Dei had already paid for useful content, but the communications team could not always find it or reuse it. Allison said they would ask, “You paid a photographer or videographer to come cover your game, and you used five assets on social media. Where are the other 55 that person took?”   
• Community-submitted content had no clear system. “Before PhotoShelter UGC, it was text messages or email. [Families, students, and parents] would send, ‘Here’s a great photo,’ and it’s tiny,” Allison explained. That worked for a few one-off moments, but it did not give Mater Dei an organized way to collect content from major events.

“The biggest challenge was finding a centralized, easy way to collect content from 28 different CIF sports and six club sports, both for their own storytelling purposes and for the global school storytelling purposes. It was really siloed out. Some programs understood how critical it was to capture and catalog images while students were in season, but beyond that, it would begin and end there.”

Allison Bergeron, Executive Director of Communications & Media Relations, Mater Dei High School

The solution: One place to save and share their best moments

Before PhotoShelter, Mater Dei had great content coming from every part of campus, but the team could not always find it or use it again. Now, the school has a shared library that helps teams contribute content, find the right assets faster, and keep each student’s story connected to the larger school brand for years to come. 

Here’s how PhotoShelter helps Mater Dei work faster and tell student stories: 

• One central home for Mater Dei’s content. Mater Dei now uses PhotoShelter to collect, organize, distribute, and reuse content across sports, admissions, the arts, advancement, philanthropy, student activities, and external storytelling. Allison called PhotoShelter “a critical game changer for us this year [to collect and distribute] content.” 
• Teams can share content without feeling like they lose control. Coaches and departments have a shared system where they can still own their stories while contributing to the larger Mater Dei brand. The communications team can support their work without duplicating effort or taking over their identity. As Allison tells coaches, “We’re not looking to compete with you by centralizing your content and storage. We’re only going to amplify your story.” 
• The team can send the right assets in seconds. When Gatorade needed approved photos of Layli Ostavar, Allison searched in PhotoShelter and created a Smart Gallery. “I went into PhotoShelter, typed in her name, saved a Smart Gallery, and sent them 200 assets in maybe 30 seconds,” Allison said.

• AI search helps Mater Dei tell a more complete student story. When someone asks for a student’s story, the team may need images from athletics, faith, service, academics, the arts, summer camps, and campus life. Allison said PhotoShelter’s AI Visual Search helps them gather assets that are not just “sports- or program-specific,” adding, “It tells the story of the whole child.” 
• FileFlow keeps the content library available from anywhere. Mater Dei’s team moves across campus, events, games, and community moments, so mobile access matters. FileFlow gives them access to PhotoShelter when they are away from their desks. Allison described it as “having PhotoShelter in your pocket at all times.” 
• College Commitment Day content now moves in hours instead of days. Mater Dei uses PhotoShelter to deliver photos and student commitment videos to sponsors, families, students, coaches, and colleges. That helps families and students celebrate the moment while it still feels fresh. Allison said content that “used to take a couple of days can be delivered in hours.” 
• PhotoShelter UGC helps Mater Dei collect real community moments at scale. Mater Dei now uses PhotoShelter UGC to collect content submissions from families and students. At one new student parent welcome night, Allison said they received “30 or 40 submissions.” That gives the school more authentic content and helps build a student’s story from the first moments on campus.

“With a school like ours that has this deep athletic history, we’ll get requests for photos of a student during their years at Mater Dei. It might not just be football assets. It might be Bryce Young serving as a Eucharistic minister at Mass, reading at Mass, or leading kids at a summer camp.”

Allison Bergeron, Executive Director of Communications & Media Relations, Mater Dei High School

Mater Dei built a shared content system for the whole school

PhotoShelter helps make Mater Dei moments easier to collect, easier to find, and share in seconds. When content lives in one place, the communications team can move faster, coaches and departments can still tell their own stories, and the school can show a complete picture of what life at Mater Dei really looks like.

“When we had our first demo call with PhotoShelter, it felt like a dream come true. And although we are just getting started, we are beyond excited about what is ahead!  We are so confident this investment will help us work smarter, organize faster, and achieve things we only imagined previously.”

Allison Bergeron, Executive Director of Communications & Media Relations, Mater Dei High School