16hard drives a year no longer needed — four at a time, four times a year |
~20%of the archive migrated so far, with full migration targeted within six months |
March 2026
go-live for current assets, following a February pilot |
November
app launch powered by the MAM’s API talking directly to the CMS |
Overview
The National Youth Orchestra is a not-for-profit that exists to give young people the opportunity to access orchestral music — whether that is playing, listening or discovering what an orchestra is. Teenagers build confidence and skills for life, and accelerate as musicians. Fundraising is critical to that mission, and much of it depends on being able to find and reuse the right photos and videos of the young musicians NYO supports.
As NYO’s digital output grew, its media was spread across SharePoint sites and hard drives that were hard to navigate and difficult to share. Base Media Cloud helped NYO adopt a centralized, fully supported MAM environment, combining cloud storage with hands-on onboarding and ongoing account management — giving every team faster, more confident access to the assets that power fundraising, digital products and outreach. This was developed with the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Accelerator for Arts and Culture.
“The whole organization now has better access to all our assets — that’s just a brilliant outcome for us. And with the metadata, we can determine which assets are beneficial to each element of the organization.”
Rosi Callery, Head of Planning & Operations, The National Youth Orchestra
Challenge
NYO manages thousands of photos and videos created across its projects and concerts, used heavily by the fundraising and comms teams. As its content strategy expanded, storage demands were rising sharply — and without a dedicated system, finding, protecting and sharing that content was slow and manual.
- Split, hard-to-navigate storage: Photos lived on SharePoint sites and videos on hard drives — both complicated to navigate and difficult to share widely.
- No tagging or search: With no tagging system in SharePoint, the team had to look through thousands of photos each time to judge whether an image suited a particular use case.
- Hours lost in the fundraising team: Sourcing the right photos for mailings, emails and campaigns was taking hours of the fundraising team’s time.
- Clunky sharing with freelancers and on-site teams: Hard drives were passed back and forth between the comms team and freelancers, slowing down work on assets.
- Hard-to-trace case study subjects: NYO builds fundraising case studies around individual musicians it has photographed over several years. Because subjects are teenagers who change as they grow, identifying every photo of a person meant endless trawling through past projects — “I think that’s them, is it them?”
- Storage costs on the rise: NYO was approaching its licensed SharePoint storage limit — beyond which charges stack up quickly — and was accruing around 16 hard drives a year (four at a time, four times a year), a figure set to climb as its strategy grew.
“We had thousands of photos and we were looking through them regularly to work out whether a photo suited a particular use case. With no tagging system in SharePoint, that was taking hours of our fundraising team’s time — and hard drives were having to be passed back and forth between our comms team.”
Rosi Callery, Head of Planning & Operations, The National Youth Orchestra
Solution
NYO evaluated four options and chose the solution that came with Base Media Cloud. For NYO, the value was not just the platform, but the combination of storage set-up, structured onboarding and ongoing support from a team that knows the technology inside out.
- A single, searchable media environment: Photos and videos now sit in one cloud-based MAM instead of being split across SharePoint and hard drives.
- Metadata and AI-powered search: Rich metadata and AI-powered facial recognition let NYO tag assets and surface every photo of an individual musician in moments — ideal for building fundraising case studies, as well as for ensuring data governance.
- Built-in media processing: Beyond storage, NYO uses transcoding and transcription to turn raw video into searchable, ready-to-use content across the organization.
- Expertise and storage set-up: Base configured the cloud storage and guided NYO through decisions such as collection structure, drawing on expertise NYO didn’t have in-house.
- Structured onboarding and ongoing support: A dedicated Base account manager and enablement specialist supported NYO through onboarding and into business as usual, remaining on hand and responsive as the team learned the platform.
- Curated platform updates: Base tracks and curates platform releases on NYO’s behalf, so the team doesn’t have to work through release notes itself.
- Simple sharing via upload links: Freelancers can upload photos taken on the day directly through a shared link, removing the need to shuttle hard drives around.
- API-connected digital products: For NYO’s new app, NYO Play, launching in November 2026, videos are assembled through the MAM and its API talks directly to the CMS behind the app — bringing NYO’s digital products together at launch.
“What we’ve benefited from by having Base is your expertise and ability to set up the storage for us — that was a huge pro. The onboarding was incredibly helpful because we’re not experts in that at all, and knowing we’d have that support both during onboarding and ongoing is really beneficial. The Base Account Manager was superb, as was the Customer Enablement Specialist — we always felt like you were on hand.”
Rosi Callery, Head of Planning & Operations, The National Youth Orchestra
Result
NYO went live with its current assets in March 2026 and is roughly 20% through migrating its wider archive, with full migration targeted within six months. Precise time and cost savings will be quantified once the back catalog is fully migrated — and NYO and Base have agreed a follow-up case study to capture them. Even at this early stage, the immediate benefits are clear.
- Better organization-wide access: The whole organization now has easier, more confident access to its assets, with metadata helping each team find what is most relevant to them.
- Faster case study creation: Facial recognition lets the fundraising team pull up every photo of a musician and pick the best shot in moments, rather than trawling through years of past projects.
- Smoother freelancer collaboration: Upload links have streamlined working with freelancers, giving NYO quick access to photos as soon as they are taken — no more passing hard drives back and forth.
- Costs headed off before they escalated: Moving to the cloud was a pre-emptive step: it heads off escalating SharePoint storage charges as NYO neared its licensed limit, and removes the need to keep buying around 16 hard drives a year — a cost that was rising with NYO’s expanding content strategy.
- Stronger fundraising engine: Faster asset discovery directly supports NYO’s fundraising, making it quicker to identify and promote the individual musicians whose stories help raise money.
- Joined-up digital outreach: The MAM underpins NYO’s app and wider digital presence, ensuring concerts and projects live online as well as in the room for its social and digital audiences.
“Because we can now run facial recognition across our assets, we can just say, ‘these are all the pictures of this person,’ and find a good shot. It used to be endless looking through past project photos — they’re teenagers, so they’ve aged and often look really different. Now we save a lot of time.”
Rosi Callery, Head of Planning & Operations, The National Youth Orchestra
At a glance
| Metric / signal | What it means for NYO |
| 16 hard drives/year avoided | NYO no longer needs to buy or shuttle around ~16 hard drives a year to store and move video. |
| SharePoint limit averted | The move pre-empted escalating storage charges as NYO neared its licensed limit. |
| 4 options evaluated | NYO chose its MAM specifically because Base Media Cloud came with it. |
| 2 asset types unified | Photos and videos, previously split across SharePoint and hard drives, now sit in one MAM. |
| March 2026 go-live | Current assets are live in the platform, following a February 2026 pilot. |
| ~20% migrated | Archive migration is underway, with full migration targeted within six months. |
| AI + media processing live | Facial recognition, transcoding and transcription turn raw photos and video into searchable, ready-to-use assets. |
| November app launch | Videos are assembled in the MAM and served to the app’s CMS via API. |
| Part 2 to follow | A follow-up case study is planned to quantify time and cost savings once migration completes. |
Discover how Base Media Cloud helps arts, culture and not-for-profit organizations protect valuable content, make it easy to find and reuse, and turn media archives into active assets that power fundraising and audience engagement.
Photo thumbnail credit: Chris Christodoulou
