Creating a Connected Campus with 12 Colleges
Purdue University, a hub of academic excellence and vibrant campus life, needed a solution to enhance its visual content management. With a student body of over 50,000, including 17 NCAA Division I sports teams and 13 colleges and schools, the campus, sprawling across 2,600 acres, offers the marketing team an endless supply of visual stories. The abundance of visual assets produced by multiple departments highlighted the need for a centralized platform to streamline collaboration, ensure brand consistency, and enhance overall efficiency.
The Challenge: Content Demand Surges Across Campus
Christi Perry, Senior Marketing Production Manager, leads the team handling Purdue’s expanding visual content needs. Originally focused on building a photographic library for West Lafayette, the team’s role now includes Purdue Global and Purdue University in Indianapolis. With content produced by both staff and freelancers, requests for imagery have surged across campus for social media, online marketing, and print publications. Faced with growing demands from various departments, Christi’s team has struggled to organize, access, and share assets efficiently.
This demand for authenticity and immediacy made it clear that their existing system was not enough to support their needs.
- Difficult to locate and share assets efficiently. Content was scattered across multiple campuses, schools and departments, making it tough to locate what was needed quickly. Christi notes, “We have 12 different colleges… each has its own needs.”
- Branding and messaging weren’t consistent. Without a single source of truth, “keeping everyone on brand was nearly impossible,” Christi explains, leading to a fragmented brand image across the university.
- Managing and distributing assets manually. “We want authentic images, so we are consistently on campus capturing photos…most creative projects we complete have a photo and video asset involved [with it] now,” explains Christi. Their manual process for each project was time-consuming and prone to errors.
“Before PhotoShelter, we spent too much time fulfilling requests instead of focusing on our creative work.”
Christi Perry, Senior Marketing Production Manager
The Solution: PhotoShelter’s Integrated Ecosystem
Before implementing PhotoShelter, Purdue’s visual content management was fragmented and challenging. With PhotoShelter’s integrated accounts, and powerful DAM features the university has now established a unified content ecosystem that streamlines collaboration and ensures brand consistency.
- Establishing a college ecosystem. With an increasing demand for visual storytelling, the team needed to provide a simplified collection, folder and gallery structure, strategic keywording and an easy-to-use in-brand comprehensive photo library. A revamp a few years ago saw the launch of Purdue’s MarComm photo library, Campus Partner Photo Library, Campus Partner Video Library and Purdue University Global Library, powered by PhotoShelter. Now, with PhotoShelter’s integrated accounts, a total of 12 Purdue schools have joined together to share access to a centralized repository, with over one million assets and around 5,000 users.
The success of Integrated Accounts is evident in an example from the “Purdue Computes” initiative. After President Mung Chiang launched this 5-year, multi-million dollar effort to position Purdue as a leader in computer science, AI, and microchip research, interest surged across campus and beyond, creating a need for photos from the clean room labs. The Marketing and Communications team captured these images and seamlessly shared them with the Purdue Research Foundation’s PhotoShelter library via Integrated Accounts, enabling the Foundation to effectively support the President’s vision. - Collaborating across a connected campus. The Campus Partner Photo Library within PhotoShelter provides all campus partners with access to curated, up-to-date imagery from across the campus, with Christi ensuring the collection stays fresh by maintaining 2.5+ years’ worth of photos. To streamline the process, the marketing team now uses PhotoShelter Workspaces to collaboratively select and share the best images. Photographers capture hundreds of seasonal and event-based images, narrow them down to the top 15-20, and add them to a Workspace shared with Strategic Communications. This helps manage image requests, allowing campus partners to easily access current, brand-aligned photography for their marketing needs.
- Working together to capture campus moments in real-time. We’ve built relationships with other campus partners, like Athletics,” Christi says, “to share timely images that benefit the entire university.” In one example, the University’s former president was announcing to the board of directors he was going to retire. The board asked the Purdue Marketing and Communications photo team to send a photographer to capture this historic moment. However, all of their photographers were on assignment too far away to make it in time. They worked with the Athletics Department who sent one of its photographers to capture this moment. The marketing department was able to get instant access to the photos through PhotoShelter’s Integrated Accounts and use them immediately for this important milestone.
“With PhotoShelter, we can provide campus partners with the exact photography they need for their marketing. This creates a culture of campus partners being able to fish for themselves from our photo collections and galleries.”
Christi Perry, Senior Marketing Production Manager
Sharing ‘Only at Purdue’ Moments with PhotoShelter
PhotoShelter has transformed how Purdue University manages and shares its visual content. With everything in one place, Purdue can effortlessly share those special ‘Only at Purdue’ moments, ensuring that every department stays on brand and connected. It’s not just about managing content—it’s about empowering the entire campus to tell its story in the best possible way.
“We are the main drivers of the university’s brand and everyone relies on us providing fresh assets constantly. PhotoShelter allows us to do that.”
Christi Perry, Senior Marketing Production Manager
