Second Harvest of Silicon Valley Fuels Community & Content with PhotoShelter

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A Digital Strategy for Good

Founded in 1974, Second Harvest of Silicon Valley is one of the largest food banks in the nation and a trusted nonprofit leader in ending local hunger. The organization distributes nutritious food through a network of more than 400 partners at over 900 sites across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, reaching 500,000 people on average every month. To amplify their impact, they needed a better way to manage the visual stories driving their mission.

The Challenge: Sharing Community Stories with Ease

Kristen Hess Deo, Communications Manager, and Ruth Rios, Senior Social Media Manager, are part of the team responsible for curating visual content that tells the story of hunger and community resilience. Their daily workflow included capturing, organizing, and sharing images and videos for marketing and outreach. Before PhotoShelter, however, Second Harvest struggled with media management.

• Disorganized drives slowed collaboration. Media files were scattered across different folders and platforms, making it difficult to locate specific assets. This fragmentation led to time-consuming searches and hindered collaborative efforts across departments. Kristen described it as “just a mess” that added stress to the workflow.
• Difficulty locating specific images. Finding the right images for campaigns or social media posts was a tedious process. The storage system lacked proper tagging, which often delayed project timelines. Ruth mentioned, “Our shared drive was cluttered, and photos were often stored in different locations—sometimes in folders, other times in separate drives or platforms.”
• Limited permissions for sharing. Their shared drives offered little flexibility for controlling access. There was no simple way to grant permissions to different stakeholders, limiting effective collaboration with partners, the media, and other departments. Kristen emphasized, “With PhotoShelter, we password-protect albums that are for select staff and projects. On the other side of that access, we have created albums that the public outside our organization can access. This is something we can’t do with our shared drives, and it allows us to curate content for people like the media, partners, and our clients.”

“Before PhotoShelter, someone would have to know exactly what they want and ask someone on our marketing team to go and find an image on our shared drive and give them an exact location to find it. There was no real way to find what you needed or see what was available because so many different staff over the years had different ways of organizing images… There were multiple folders and locations storing the same kinds of photos.”

Kristen Hess Deo, Communications Manager

The Solution: Asset Management That Feeds Outreach

Before PhotoShelter, managing visual assets at Second Harvest was a challenge. Now, everything is centralized, accessible, and easy to manage in PhotoShelter DAM, improving efficiency and collaboration. Their marketing team can stay on top of all visual assets and everything is easy to find.

• Centralized digital asset management. Second Harvest eliminated the confusion of scattered drives. All images and videos are now stored in one accessible location within PhotoShelter, which significantly streamlined team workflows and reduced the time spent searching for assets. Kristen noted, “PhotoShelter is the most organized way [to store our images]. It just helps my brain relax.” 
• Improved search and organization. The team now categorizes galleries by fiscal year, staff, donor, and specific keywords, making finding the right image quick and intuitive. “It’s really helpful to teams like social & email to just go in [to PhotoShelter] and once everything is tagged correctly, we’re able to search for what we need and find it really seamlessly,” Kristen added.

• Flexible permission settings and controls. PhotoShelter’s robust permission features have allowed Second Harvest to create tailored access for different stakeholders. Kristen explained, “We have made lots of images and b-roll publicly available on our portal to the media. And what’s really been cool for me is, I see that footage end up on the news, on TV segments. Because they’re reporters and the 24-hour news cycle, they need content ASAP and we can’t always meet their deadlines… so they have happily used PhotoShelter to get what they need.”
• Improved discoverability with artificial intelligence. Using PhotoShelter AI Visual Search, the team can now find misplaced files or content they haven’t tagged with specific metadata. With AI Visual Search, they can simply describe the photo they’re looking for and see instant results.

Ruth told us, “We were geeking out over the AI integration. During the Super Bowl, we were challenged by Harvesters – The Community Food Network in Kansas City – to a friendly competition. With the Chiefs gearing up to play the San Francisco 49ers, we were competing to see who could get the highest number of donors to donate before Super Bowl Sunday, and we needed to access photos of us working with the 49ers in the past to promote the challenge. Thanks to the AI, we simply typed ’49ers’ and instantly found all the relevant images of clients and volunteers wearing 49ers gear for our campaign. It made everything so much easier.”

“The staff who implemented PhotoShelter…only move over photos after a certain date to clean up our photo/video offerings. This makes our PhotoShelter account more digestible for staff to use and isn’t as overwhelming as our shared drive, which is a big plus.”

Kristen Hess Deo, Communications Manager

PhotoShelter Helps Second Harvest Better Tell Its Story

Second Harvest’s media management is now efficient and organized, allowing the communications team to focus more on storytelling rather than administrative tasks. The streamlined system improved operational efficiency and enhanced the team’s ability to effectively tell the story of Second Harvest’s impact on the community.

“Coming to our PhotoShelter account allows all of our staff the ability to see the most up-to-date and approved visuals from our work, which is helpful because we’ve been in business for so long. There are so many photos, it’s nice to know what’s most recent.”

Kristen Hess Deo, Communications Manager

Go Behind the Scenes with Second Harvest of Silicon Valley