Visit Bend Builds Authentic Local Brand with PhotoShelter

Visit Bend is a non-profit economic development organization dedicated to promoting tourism on behalf of the city of Bend, Oregon. Justin Keyes-Bundy, Visit Bend’s Digital Content Manager, relies on high-quality visual content to attract visitors and generate revenue to invest in projects for the Bend Sustainability Fund and the Bend Cultural Tourism Fund.

The Challenge: Managing a Growing Content Library

With a vision to showcase Bend’s vibrant community, Justin Keyes-Bundy leads a program that hires locals to create diverse content, supported by a team of photographers, videographers, and local content creators. However, Justin faced a number of challenges as he built out the team’s digital media library:

• Disjointed content management. The Visit Bend team relied on a combination of Dropbox and internal servers for content organization, a system that Justin found increasingly difficult to wrangle. “As our content grew, so did the complexity of managing it,” Justin explained.
• Upload and permission nightmares. Contributors needed an easier way to upload content and Justin needed an easier way to share access to files with different levels of permission. “The biggest issue was with sharing files out to external partners and stakeholders—using Dropbox as that delivery method limited our ability to track who had access to what. PhotoShelter cleaned this process up with the ability to email usage rights, approved uses, and a gallery password/expiration date all in one place.”
• No way to distribute content in real time. “We need to be able to have [contributors] send us content within minutes,” explained Justin. “We capture a lot of events up on the mountain, and being able to get that down to our team in town quickly is essential for us.” This lack of functionality impacted the team’s ability to tell compelling stories in order to drive more visitors.
• Overwhelming content requests. As Visit Bend’s content repository grew, so did requests for access. Justin often found himself manually finding and sending files to partners, and struggling to keep pace with the town’s number of events and stories.

“When the amount of content we had grew, making sure we were able to track who we were sending things to and who had access got really hard. PhotoShelter is a great tool to help us streamline that process.”

Justin Keyes-Bundy, Digital Content Manager

The Solution: Streamlining Digital Asset Management with PhotoShelter

Switching to PhotoShelter provided Justin with a centralized location for Visit Bend’s growing content library and a streamlined solution for content sharing among the team’s photographers, videographers, and local contributors. Here’s how smart digital asset management helped Visit Bend succeed:

• All content in one place. “Now with PhotoShelter, everything is accessible from a single, streamlined platform,” Justin notes. With a one-stop shop for content, Justin and his team can seamlessly publish campaigns that attract more visitors and move the Bend community forward.
• Increased content ROI. The ability to access all your high-quality, on-brand content makes it easy to use over and over, which is a big deal for a small team like Justin’s. “You see the growth of our content creation as a whole and know we’re being authentic to the brand.”
• Easy access for stakeholders. PhotoShelter’s smart and simple system made it easy for Visit Bend’s local businesses, media partners, influencers, and creative professionals to easily access the organization’s digital library. Stakeholders now can upload, manage, and retrieve media without wasting time answering content requests.
• Authentically representing Bend. Visit Bend can now share authentic content with the local community in real time, which showcases all Bend has to offer, aligning with Justin’s vision for the brand and elevating the organization’s digital presence. Justin’s authentic content strategy has yielded great results. Visit Bend’s Local Content Creator Program, which leverages local photographers to capture content, has achieved an organic reach of over 2 million, over 100k likes, and an ROI of 227%.

“Our brand really relies on being able to have the most up-to-date content authentically from people out in the community. It’s not this team sitting in the office. It’s what the people who live here are doing. It’s going out and playing in the snow on a Tuesday before work. It would be really hard for our brand to be able to authentically show and tell Visit Bend’s stories without PhotoShelter.”

Justin Keyes-Bundy, Digital Content Manager

Visit Bend’s Path to Authentic Brand Storytelling with PhotoShelter

PhotoShelter has transformed Visit Bend’s approach to managing digital content so they can grow their brand. As a small team with a diverse network of contributors, smart digital asset management has streamlined their workflow, making collaborating and sharing stories faster and easier. Justin and his team can now focus their efforts on creating content that elevates the community and builds Bend’s authentic local brand.

“I would definitely describe PhotoShelter as that next step in your asset management if you are really trying to get robust in your content creation and have a lot of stakeholders that you need to communicate with. It’s a great tool to house all of that in one spot and access it on mobile or anywhere you are.”

Justin Keyes-Bundy, Digital Content Manager