Customer Spotlight

How the Savannah College of Art and Design prepares students for creative careers

Founded in 1978, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) has established itself as "The University for Creative Careers," dedicated to preparing students for success in creative industries. With campuses in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, plus an international location in Lacoste, France, and online offerings, the university serves approximately 17,000 students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries.

90%

adoption rate among students, faculty, and staff

500K

Videos migrated into Vimeo


450,000+

video views in year one, with 76,000 unique viewers

Challenge

Preparing students for creative careers means providing them with professional-grade tools that mirror what they will later encounter in the industry. However, SCAD’s existing video platform was creating barriers rather than bridges to success. The university had been using a legacy system for over a decade that was increasingly failing to meet the needs of its students, faculty, and staff members.

"We were starting to get more and more support tickets for issues with the platform. It was difficult to share videos, and it was difficult to organize videos," remembers Caleb Hanan, Associate Director of Instructional Media.

The problems were mounting daily, and even basic functions like tagging were cumbersome when they worked at all. Faculty and staff could only share videos with current students, so they had to recreate content collections each semester rather than building libraries for ongoing use.

With over 500,000 videos in the school’s library, the situation was particularly challenging for an institution that relies on video to educate students. From faculty instruction to student creative projects, SCAD needed a professional platform that would foster collaboration.

“Our students needed a professional tool that they would use beyond their career at SCAD — an industry-standard tool that would take them into creative careers."
— Kristen Wheelock, Senior Director of Educational Technology

Solution

SCAD's educational technology team knew they needed a partner that could move fast and scale. After evaluating their long-term strategic goals for digital learning, they chose Vimeo. 

"We knew almost immediately that Vimeo was the right solution,” says Kristen Wheelock, Senior Director of Educational Technology. “We were amazed by the tools that were built into the system, the ease of the sharing and embedding, and the libraries that we could build." 

Beyond solving immediate technical problems, the college also wanted to prepare students for their creative careers. "Part of the reason that we chose Vimeo is because it's what students will be using in their creative career," explains Caleb. 

Migrating over half a million videos from their legacy system to Vimeo initially seemed daunting, but Vimeo's engineers moved all the content using an API integration. What the college expected to be a lengthy, complex process was handled for them and completed within two quarters, and implemented immediately after. “If you had told me in the beginning that it was going to be that quick, I don't think I would've believed you,” says Kristen Wheelock, Senior Director of Educational Technology.


Outcome

The results speak for themselves. Within the first year, 95% of the university's students, faculty, and staff had already activated their Vimeo accounts. The platform helped professors and staff generate over 450,000 video views from 76,000 unique viewers, accumulating more than 52,000 hours of watch time. Faculty members elevated course content by creating nearly 700 showcase pages, building video libraries they can use over and over again while also easily updating content in real time. 

The transformation goes beyond metrics: The entire university can easily create screen recordings, organize tutorials into showcases, and share content seamlessly through the system. Support tickets virtually disappeared, freeing up IT resources for more strategic initiatives, all while Vimeo’s collaborative workflows made it easier for students and staff to work together on projects.

Best of all, students now have access to the same professional creative platform they'll use in agencies and studios after graduation. As Chris Brandon, a Film and Television Professor, puts it, "Being able to work with the Vimeo platform day in, day out as students is going to make them better professionals when they move on into their creative careers."

“Imagine giving your faculty the tools that they need to create amazing instructional videos in a way that is able to be reused again and again. It's removing work for them and inspiring them at the same time. That's what Vimeo has given us."
— Caleb Hanan, Associate Director of Instructional Media
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