To Be a Great Storyteller, First Be a Great Collector of Stories
The problem isn’t that your school doesn’t have stories. It’s that one person is expected to find them all.
One day, a teacher stepped out of her classroom and said to Carolyn Lucas, “Oh, you missed this really, really magical moment that happened earlier. I’m so sorry you missed it.”
Carolyn was her school’s Communications Director. She spent 15 hours a week running around campus with her camera, trying to be everywhere at once. And in that moment, she realized something: the teacher genuinely believed that if Carolyn wasn’t there, the story couldn’t be told.
Why does she think that I need to be there for that story to be told? We have storytellers all over campus. They’re in the classroom. Those moments are happening every day.
Carolyn Lucas, Former Communications Director
That question is the starting point for this webinar. Not “how do you get better photos” — but who gets to be a storyteller, and what happens when you give that permission to everyone.
The Marcom Team of One
The webinar opens with a scene most school communicators will recognize immediately: newsletters, flyers, missing photos, unknown students, magazines, slideshows, social media, and events — all on one desk, all urgent, all assigned to one person.
Rob Kodama spent 28 years as an admissions director at a private school before joining Vidigami. He remembers what that looked like from the other side — the 40+ hours at the end of the year spent searching for photos, the stories that lived on teachers’ personal phones and never made it back to the school, the international families who couldn’t access social media from their home countries and were simply left out.
The school doesn’t even know these photos exist because we don’t share them back to the school typically. When I walk out the door, what happens to all those photos that were on my phone?
Rob Kodama, Vidigami
Every time someone leaves — a teacher, a coach, an admissions director with 28 years of institutional memory — their stories go too.
Empower the Storytellers
The shift Carolyn describes isn’t a technology decision. It’s a philosophy decision. The marcom person’s job isn’t to be the only storyteller — it’s to build a community of them.
Teachers are storytellers. They’re in the room when the magical moments happen. Parents are storytellers. They’re on the sidelines at every game, at every performance, at every field trip. Coaches, volunteers, professional photographers, even students — all of them are capturing moments that the communications office will never see.
Vidigami gives every one of them a way to contribute. A media request link — a single URL sent by email — turns any chaperone into a content contributor. Parent groups get their own upload section for weekend events. A student at one school manages the digital signage collection, updating it weekly. A parent organization runs a digital lost and found, photographing stray coats and water bottles so families can reclaim them.
How can we empower the storytellers rather than expecting one person in a communications role to be in that place?
Carolyn Lucas, Former Communications Director
When the work is distributed, the library grows faster than any one person could fill it — and the stories that were always happening start making it into the archive.
The ROI Is Measurable
Carolyn ran a live ROI calculation during the webinar. She walked through the actual math: her hourly rate, her time per task before and after Vidigami, across every workflow that touched photos — taking and uploading, sorting and organizing, searching for specific content, managing privacy preferences, building slideshows, responding to photo requests, pulling yearbook content.
The result: 983 hours saved per year. Over $68,000 in recovered staff time.
The biggest single savings wasn’t in searching or organizing. It was in taking and uploading photos — because the work was no longer concentrated in one person. The community was doing it instead.
Want to run the same calculation for your school? Try the ROI Calculator →
- 15 hours a week running around campus with a camera, trying to be everywhere at once
- Teachers assumed the marcom person had to be present for a story to be captured
- Photos scattered across personal phones, shared drives, and individual albums
- When staff left, their photos and institutional memory left with them
- International families left out — social media platforms blocked in their home countries
- Consent management: printed opt-out lists, manual checks on every group photo
- 40+ hours at year-end just searching for photos for newsletters, yearbooks, and reports
- 983 hours saved per year; $68,000+ in recovered staff time
- Teachers, parents, coaches, and students all contribute — one central place for everything
- Media request links turn any chaperone into a content contributor with a single email
- Privacy preferences set once — red flags appear automatically, public slideshows skip opted-out students
- Nearly 10 years of archives searchable by student, event, and year — “within a minute”
- International families access the platform regardless of social media restrictions
- Administrators spend 5 minutes reviewing the feed each morning and know everything that happened in the last 24 hours
The Stories You Collect Today Are the Connections You Build Tomorrow
Rob describes the enrollment funnel the way most schools don’t want to think about it: one-third of families are actively shopping for another school at any given time. The decision to stay — or leave — is made long before any formal re-enrollment conversation. It’s made at the dinner table, in small moments, when a parent feels connected to what’s happening inside the building.
I had parents tell me all the time how great it was that they had conversation starters. When you have your child excitedly unpacking a story like that pretty much daily after school, that is a serious return on investment.
Carolyn Lucas, Former Communications Director
And it goes further than retention. Rob talks about alumni — about the reality that you don’t know, when a student is in third grade, that they’ll be the one who writes the check for the new science building. But if you have ten years of photos organized and searchable, you can send them something real: a reminder of who they were, what their school gave them, what they were part of.
Just imagine the power if you could send out reminders of what they were like as a freshman, a sophomore, a junior, a senior.
Rob Kodama, Vidigami
That’s not a photo storage problem. That’s an institutional legacy problem. And it starts with collecting the stories while they’re happening.
Watch the Full Webinar
Rob Kodama and Carolyn Lucas walk through the full storytelling and ROI framework — including the live ROI calculator demo, the Vidigami product walkthrough, and Q&A with schools from across the country.
Full Webinar: To Be a Great Storyteller, First Be a Great Collector of Stories
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Ready to stop being the only storyteller?
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