How Fort Worth Country Day Built a Story Wall That Updates Itself
Every school takes thousands of photos. The hard part isn’t capturing moments — it’s getting them to the people who care about them. Fort Worth Country Day uploads more than 50,000 photos a year. Their website pulls content from Instagram, LinkedIn, Vimeo, and news feeds. But their own photo archive — the richest source of authentic school life — couldn’t reach the website at all.
This is the story of what happened when a school asked for something that didn’t exist yet. And two companies built it.
A Platform That Couldn’t Reach the Website
Fort Worth Country Day started using Vidigami around 2015 — initially as a way to store and organize the thousands of photos their communications team produced. The platform worked well for that. Photos were tagged, searchable, and private to the community.
But the school’s website told a different story. The Interactive Schools–built site at fwcd.org had a dynamic story wall that aggregated content from social media, video platforms, and news articles. Visitors could filter by Instagram, LinkedIn, or Vimeo. What they couldn’t see was the school’s own photo archive — the tens of thousands of images that showed what daily life actually looked like.
“The real pain point is in managing content — the tens of thousands of photos that are out there that we’re trying to access and make use of.”
— Mandy Chan, Founder, Vidigami
Then COVID hit. Teachers were stretched thin. Asking them to adopt a new tool felt tone-deaf. The platform sat underused as a community storytelling tool while photos piled up on personal devices and disappeared into transient social feeds.
- Vidigami used mainly as internal photo storage — not community-facing
- Website story wall pulled from social media but not from the school’s own archive
- Classroom moments, field trips, and smaller sports stayed on teachers’ phones
- COVID stalled teacher adoption — extra tools felt like extra burden
- Content had to be manually replicated to reach the website
- Vidigami collections appear on the website story wall alongside social feeds
- Branded hashtags auto-route content to the right pages — no manual edits
- Teachers batch-upload from their phones via one-click links
- Dining pavilion screens display Vidigami slideshows — students see themselves
- One workflow feeds every channel: website, social, newsletters, print, screens
“This Is the Dream Come True”
In a previous Vidigami webinar, Reggie Johnson said something out loud: he wished Vidigami albums could appear directly on the school’s Interactive Schools story wall. It was an offhand comment. Mandy Chan and Simon Noakes heard it — and built it.
Those of you who were at Mandy’s Vidigami webinar a few months ago might have heard me say that one thing that would be great would be to have on this media wall Vidigami collections. And Simon and Mandy have made it happen. So this is the dream come true.
Reggie Johnson, Fort Worth Country Day
The integration connects Vidigami directly to the Interactive Schools website platform. When Reggie curates a collection of photos in Vidigami, marks it public, and applies a branded hashtag, it flows through to the relevant page on fwcd.org automatically. No CMS editing. No re-uploading. No duplication.
“It was meant to be a Christmas present, but it became a Valentine’s gift instead.”
— Simon Noakes, on the timeline of building the integration
Reggie’s response: “It’s a wonderful Valentine’s present and it shows, definitely shows the love.”
One Hashtag, Every Page
The integration runs on a simple principle: publish once, appear everywhere based on context.
Each page on the FWCD website is configured to display content tagged with a specific branded hashtag. The Lower School page shows collections tagged #FWCDLowerSchool. The Upper School page shows #FWCDUpperSchool. The inclusivity page shows #FWCDInclusion. When Reggie tags a new collection, it appears on the corresponding page within minutes — without anyone touching the website.
If you just got rid of all of those logos and icons and looked at this grid here, they’re just stories. You don’t really care. The end user doesn’t care whether it’s coming from Instagram, from LinkedIn, from Pinterest, from Vidigami. They just want to see the story.
Simon Noakes, Interactive Schools
The story wall also surfaces related albums based on tags. A visitor watching a Lunar New Year celebration gallery sees other community events appear below it — creating a natural path deeper into the school’s visual narrative without anyone curating that journey by hand.
“It effectively replicates the structure of our school. We’ve set it up to kind of match our programs, our departments.”
— Reggie Johnson, on how the Vidigami archive mirrors the school’s organizational structure
When Teachers Stopped Waiting to Be Asked
The biggest shift didn’t come from professional photography or the communications team. It came from teachers.
Vidigami’s media upload request link gives any contributor a simple, shareable URL. No app download. No login. Teachers open the link on their phone, select photos, and upload. The first time a hesitant teacher tried it, something changed.
Once they do that, they’re like, they’ll come back to us and be like, “that was so easy.” And they become regular contributors. I have teachers that are now contributing events that I didn’t even know about.
Reggie Johnson, Fort Worth Country Day
That last part matters. Teachers uploading events the communications team didn’t know about means the school’s story is no longer limited to what one team can cover. Field trips, community service days, classroom moments — all of it now reaches the archive and, through the integration, the website.
Parents contribute too. Some are skilled photographers covering their children’s sports teams — especially the smaller teams that don’t get dedicated event coverage. The result: more perspectives, more authentic coverage, and a school story that reflects the whole community.
“Especially as the focus turns from us originally using it mainly for marketing and communication to now really becoming a community platform. We have a ways to go. We wanna get even better with making sure the community feels like they own it.”
— Reggie Johnson
The Beauty in Imperfect Photos
Simon Noakes frames school websites through a lens he calls “head vs. heart.” The head is functionality — navigation, usability, information architecture. The heart is what makes someone fall in love with a school — and that requires real, dynamic, story-led content.
As soon as you let the head kick in, it becomes a harder sell, right? People lose — the experience becomes functional.
Simon Noakes, Interactive Schools
Reggie echoes this from the practitioner’s side. Professional photography has its place, but the photos that stop parents mid-scroll are often the imperfect ones — a teacher laughing with students during a science experiment, kids covered in paint at a community service project, the candid shot a parent took from the sideline.
Don’t underestimate those authentic in the classroom moments … those can be more powerful than maybe we give them credit, even if it’s not perfectly set up or composed. There’s still beauty in those authentic stories.
Reggie Johnson, Fort Worth Country Day
The integration makes this philosophy practical. When dozens of people contribute photos and the best ones flow to the website automatically, the school’s digital presence stays alive without burning out the communications team.
A Living Viewbook, Built One Photo at a Time
There’s a long-term value that most families at Fort Worth Country Day haven’t realized yet.
Every photo uploaded to Vidigami is tagged with facial recognition. Over the years, this creates a cumulative, searchable archive for each student — first day of kindergarten through graduation. Every class photo, every performance, every field trip where they appeared in the background of someone else’s snapshot.
The students that come here, by the time they get to be seniors, they are gonna have a living viewbook or yearbook of all the years they were here where they can — parents can look at all the photos that they had. I don’t think they know yet the power of that.
Reggie Johnson, Fort Worth Country Day
Reggie describes the manual tagging work that seeds the facial recognition system as one of the most rewarding parts of his job — “because I know where it’s gonna lead for the families.”
Meanwhile, screens in the school’s dining pavilion display Vidigami collection slideshows. Students see photos of themselves and their classmates from the week’s events while they eat lunch. The archive isn’t just a website feature — it’s part of the school’s lived environment.
And privacy holds. Only three students at FWCD have a no-public-release flag. When a photo of a flagged student is included in a collection that gets shared publicly, it’s automatically stripped from the public version. No manual checking. No lists taped to a desk. If a family revokes consent later, photos are retroactively removed from every public share.
Watch the Full Webinar
Hear the complete conversation with Reggie Johnson, Simon Noakes, and Mandy Chan — including live demos of the integration, workflow walkthroughs, and Q&A.
Full Webinar: Authentic Storytelling at Fort Worth Country Day
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