From Photo Overload to Organized Bliss: Year One with Vidigami at Stevens Cooperative School
932 photos. That’s how many were uploaded on the first day of school.
Leah Docktor is the Director of Marketing and Communications at Stevens Cooperative School — a progressive K–8 school in Hoboken and Jersey City, New Jersey. She’s part of a two-person marcom department managing communications across two campuses and four buildings. This is the story of what happened when her school went from photo chaos to a centralized platform in one year.
The Before: A Patchwork of Media Systems
Before Vidigami, photo management at Stevens had no center. Some teachers shared photos with families through Google Drive folders. Some used Google Photo albums. Others weren’t taking or sharing photos at all.
The consequences compounded over time. When a teacher left, their Google Photo albums were deleted with their account — and the marcom team had to scramble to export before their departure. Parents with kids in multiple grades navigated a different system in every classroom. Every summer, Leah rebuilt a Google Drive folder structure from scratch for every homeroom. Responding to photo requests from admissions, advancement, and the school’s digital marketing firm meant manual aggregation every time. And opt-out management meant printing a list and checking group photos against it by hand.
Meanwhile, the school was approaching its 75th anniversary, with digitized historical photos sitting in “a holding pattern” — organized nowhere, accessible to no one.
The Rollout: Pilots, Taggers, and 932 Photos on Day One
In January 2024, Leah piloted three classrooms first — one per division — integrating Vidigami with Blackbaud so that all student and family profiles were auto-created before a single photo was uploaded. The 65 or so pilot families became ambassadors for the schoolwide launch.
The launch itself was deliberate. Before parents saw anything, faculty were asked to seed content: at the opening meeting in August, every teacher logged in on their laptop and phone, downloaded the mobile app, and were assigned homework — upload photos of your classroom before the parent launch. The surprise: their previous year’s photos had already been pre-loaded.
Stevens also created a new parent cooperative job: Vidigami Taggers. Every family at Stevens has a school job; this one turned photo tagging into a community activity. Parents tag students they recognize, verify suggestions from the AI facial recognition system, and help build personal portfolios that everyone benefits from. What could have been administrative overhead became participation.
Vidigami did not take three years for people to get used to — because over 26,000 photos have been uploaded by teachers to their class pages this year.
Leah Docktor, Director of Marketing & Communications, Stevens Cooperative School
The Results
- Photos scattered across Google Drive, Google Photo albums, and personal devices
- Google Photo albums deleted when teachers left — marcom scrambled to export before departures
- Parents in multiple grades navigated a different system per classroom
- Leah rebuilt Google Drive folder structures every summer
- Opt-out management: printed list, manual magnifying-glass checks on group photos
- Photo requests from admissions, advancement, and outside agencies required manual batching every time
- 75th anniversary archival photos digitized but not centralized for community access
- 932 photos uploaded on the first day of school
- 26,000+ photos uploaded by teachers to class pages this school year
- ~20,000 more uploaded to events and auxiliary programs
- 75% of parents logged in; 30%+ weekly or daily
- ~300 hours saved across three workflows: yearbook, event sharing, and image requests
- Admissions director self-serves: “I know exactly where to look”
- Historical photos from 1946–47 now live alongside this week’s field trip
Beyond the Numbers
The 300 hours saved made things possible that weren’t possible before. The team ran eight parent focus groups. They launched a free tuition program — a major institutional initiative that required the kind of strategic bandwidth that doesn’t exist when you’re manually managing photo exports and Google Drive folders.
I walked away from that conference with this idea that every single person in the school plays a role in retention and every single person in the school is a fundraiser. Vidigami really drives that home for us.
Leah Docktor, Director of Marketing & Communications, Stevens Cooperative School
Leah also noticed something she didn’t expect: older students, who typically stop talking about their school day, were now coming home to photos their parents had already seen. The conversation starter was already there.
The dinner table (conversation) is definitely more interesting.
Leah Docktor, Director of Marketing & Communications, Stevens Cooperative School
Renee Ramig, Director of Customer Support at Vidigami and a former IT director herself, captures why the unpolished classroom photo matters more than most schools realize:
These might not be the best of the best photos for your school, but for parents these are the best of the best — because they get to see what’s really going on in the classroom and it may also include their child.
Renee Ramig, Director of Customer Support, Vidigami
Watch the Full Webinar
Hear Leah Docktor walk through the full Year One story — the onboarding playbook, the Vidigami Taggers program, the ROI breakdown, and the Q&A with schools from across the country.
Full Webinar: Year One with Vidigami at Stevens Cooperative School
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See what Year One could look like at your school.
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