Food for the Hungry Case Study

Since 1971, Food for the Hungry has provided global humanitarian relief to communities in need in over 20 countries. As natural disasters and civilian conflicts continue to rise at alarming rates, nonprofit organizations must focus on rapidly scaling their services to meet demand. But in order to scale quickly, they need to fundraise constantly and consistently. But, how?

For a nonprofit that delivers life-saving services in times of crisis, its main catalyst for generating funds, resources, and general support has always been its engaging visual storytelling strategy. However, as their team and goals grew, they needed a more manageable way to collaborate on creating, delivering, and distributing content.

Food for Hungry’s Senior Communications Manager, Beth Allen, explained to us how her main challenge was finding a way to train the growing list of international partners and contributors on best practices for delivering on-brand content and managing the asset library. For her, PhotoShelter was an obvious fit.

“We bring in 60 to 80 stories a year, so having all those assets in one place allows us to make decisions about where to push that story out based on the where the story can be best used and on the quality level of everything—it’s great to be able to see what the quality level is before we push it out.“

– Beth Allen, Food for the Hungry Senior Communications Manager

The Challenge

• Develop a DAM library that supports a 15-person marketing team, plus daily communications with thousands of volunteers, contractors, and partners across 20 countries worldwide.
• Increase organizational buy-in and usability of DAM platform.
• Create and share more impactful assets to increase audience engagement at scale and increase nonprofit organizations’ income overall.

How We Help

The Results

• A customizable, scalable, secure DAM platform for enterprise clients.
• A fast and easy-to-use platform experience for creative marketing teams to create, collect and share impactful content with one another.
• Built-in customizable security features like a range of visibility and access settings allow main Library users to grant selected asset access to external partners and the public.

Enabling Growth

Fundraising is a critical objective for any nonprofit. By providing a scalable solution to manage and access their digital assets from anywhere, combined with our collaborative product capabilities which enable their team to produce more content, we vicariously helped Food for the Hungry increase their income 33% over the past four years.

“We’ve grown a lot; we’ve grown from 2017 our U.S. income was $110 million, we’ve got $153 million in 2021 and while I can’t say that PhotoShelter is responsible for the growth, what I can say is that PhotoShelter allowed us to start workflows so that we didn’t get overwhelmed.”

Beth Allen, Senior Communications Manager at Food for the Hungry

Providing Process Agility

According to Action Against Hunger, “Around the world, more than enough food is produced to feed the global population—but as many as 811 million people still go hungry.[4] After steadily declining for a decade, world hunger is on the rise, affecting 9.9% of people globally.”

Making the process agile for us isn’t about [the fact that] it saves time, it saves money. We can also save lives by getting things out more quickly and PhotoShelter is very intuititive. It’s easy for those 25 partners to be able to go in from the link that we send them and pick up photos from there. That has really fostered faster emails, faster social media campaigns, and supporters worldwide.

Beth Allen, Senior Communications Manager at Food for the Hungry

As an organization dedicated to authentic storytelling, here at PhotoShelter, we strongly believe in supporting mission-driven causes like Food for the Hungry and other nonprofits with humanitarian relief at the forefront.