Background

Nashville PBS serves the Nashville community through an act as old as time: storytelling. Whether known as Nashville Public Television, WNPT, or Channel 8, the station’s 2.4 million viewers have come to depend on the station to tell the local stories that reflect and impact their lives.

 Senior Director of Brand, Digital, and Marketing Shane Burkeen says the message has always been the same—before, during, and after the rebrand. To reflect the enduring connection to the city, they had a new 19-foot neon sign created to match the iconic signs for the honky-tonks up and down Broadway Street.

 “Our mission has always been the same, whatever name you call us,” he said. We’re rooted in this community and are still part of the fabric of Nashville.”

Challenge: shifting the mindset to digital

Broadcast media is a complex industry, and nonprofits that rely on public funding and private donations face even more hurdles. Burkeen says wearing many hats is a common theme in nonprofit life. Everyone at Nashville PBS does more jobs than their title would suggest. One of Burkeen’s official roles has been shifting the broadcast mindset to a digital one.

“Bringing new technology into the mix changes everything that television is,” he explains.

For the video producers on Nashville PBS’s team, transitioning to digital production meant learning new delivery methods for diverse audiences and exploring new approaches to storytelling to keep viewers hooked. It also meant a new way of working at Nashville PBS.

 Burkeen’s digital team was well-versed on working remotely and sharing large files of raw footage because of the nature of the digital space, but other colleagues struggled. The station was slow to adopt cloud storage, and relying entirely on on-premise servers suddenly left everyone in the lurch.

“People were going so far as parking their cars outside the station building to transfer files they needed for projects,” Burkeen remembers. “We were wiping down hard drives with disinfectant before passing them to other people.”

Burkeen’s team took charge in helping the organization learn how to effectively work remotely. People began turning to various cloud solutions to share files. But with so many disparate systems in use, there was no standard and no oversight. Footage got lost. Editors didn’t know what they were missing. Nashville PBS needed centralized cloud storage, fast.

“Immediately, my mind went to Dropbox,” Burkeen says.

Results: making the hard work of nonprofits easier

Of the 33 employees at Nashville PBS, 25 use Dropbox tools to share, find, manage, review, and create content. Usage is high, but adoption alone doesn’t capture how important the platform has been to the broadcaster. “It’s what we did to survive,” Burkeen says. “Now, we’re thriving.”

Not that they haven’t had their challenges. PBS recently experienced a public funding cut, and the local station felt the effects immediately. With the rate of digital growth, Burkeen’s team was looking to expand the department but all of those plans were put on hold. It was a high-stress, emotionally charged time, and Burkeen searched for a way to move forward.

Once again, Dropbox was the answer. He used Dash to quickly get up to speed on the graphics files, creating templates his team could modify for each project.

“It saves us so much time,” Burkeen says. In addition to cross-platform search, he uses Dash’s AI to write metadata and social captions from video transcripts. “When you start using Dash, you realize it’s not just a search agent. It’s almost like a personal assistant,” he adds.

That assistant was integral to developing Nashville PBS’s 63rd birthday campaign, Viewers Like Me Support Nashville PBS. Burkeen's team collected personal stories from the community about what Nashville PBS means to them and created an upload system between Airtable and Dropbox to house the submissions. 

“I used Dropbox’s transcript feature and Dash to help write video descriptions. I was able to add 20 new videos in just three hours instead of it taking a week,” Burkeen says.

Then, they aired these stories on the network for Nashville PBS’s 63 birthday celebration week and online through the PBS app, YouTube, and other social media channels. Whether describing current PBS KIDS programming or vintage shows, the stories resonated with viewers, and the initiative raised more than $100,000.

“Dash was critical to that success,” Burkeen says. “Without all these community members sharing their stories of love for Nashville PBS on our platforms I don’t believe we would have been as successful raising money. Messages from your neighbors and friends always speak louder.”

Just as important as the platform features is the support behind them. Between the technical, emotional, and financial support of Dropbox’s nonprofit pricing, Burkeen feels his team is well-equipped for just about anything. It helped them adapt during an organizational crisis, and that value is why Burkeen joined the Dropbox Partner Program—to help other nonprofits in similar circumstances.

"The work I’ve done with Dropbox to improve Dash and improve the life of somebody missing employees at another nonprofit is what I’m most proud of," he says. “I would recommend Dropbox to anybody, but especially nonprofits that need to be efficient."

Throughout the ups and downs, Dropbox has given Nashville PBS’s digital director something else: peace of mind. Burkeen knows he can find the files he needs at any time, share them with anyone, and create the assets the station needs to continue telling their story, along with the stories of Nashvillians.