Member Article

New tech helps British Fencing’s athletes and partners to manage, approve and share content

British Fencing has deployed new technology to streamline digital content production, approval and sharing – working with fencers, content creators and partners.

The introduction of a Canto digital asset management (DAM) library is enabling athletes and photographers globally to save and share imagery and video from training and competitions. This central library is accessible anywhere through a web browser or the Canto mobile app. It also stores audio files, brochures, presentations, information packs and branding materials – and enables immediate secure third-party access to the latest approved content without the need for individual downloads.

Prior to the Tokyo Games, British Olympic fencer Marcus Mepstead was based in New York with Covid restrictions limiting travel. When announcing Marcus’s Olympic qualification, Team GB arranged for photographs to be taken locally and shared them with British Fencing. Uploading the imagery to British Fencing’s Canto library and providing simple access to both Marcus and the Olympic Team Manager allowed shots for media and marketing to be quickly approved and made sharable.

Furthermore, images shot by Team GB photographers on site at camp in Tokyo were selected and uploaded into the library, enabling the British Fencing team to easily and quickly publish to social media.

British Fencing is the national governing body for fencing in Great Britain and runs programmes to get people interested in the sport. At the heart of promoting fencing as an enjoyable, safe and accessible sport, is the need to produce and share a lot of up-to-date, widely available digital content.

Sophie DeVooght, Media and Communications Manager at British Fencing, says: “Sharing content is vital to breaking down misconceptions that often create barriers for people to try fencing. A great way for the team to break barriers is to visually show how exciting and inclusive fencing is. With Canto, we can use the best and most up-to-date content assets.”

More agile content uploading and sharing

Team members and athletes are provided their own Canto upload links meaning they can send images and videos to the central library no matter where they are in the world. Canto will also ensure that the governing body has consistent permission to use uploaded assets from photographers at international competitions. This means their photos can now be published straight away on British Fencing’s website and social media and used for media outreach.

Canto’s ‘Portals’ feature enables third parties, including partners, media and British Fencing affiliated clubs, to download approved content. A Portal for clubs includes content for them to promote club activities, using social media assets, imagery, logos and posters.

Sophie says: “We’re able to provide assets through the Portal that club members can use on their platforms to advertise and get the word out. We can refresh the Portal with different content, and they can go in and choose the assets they want. That’s a really great thing for our clubs as they’re looking to return to fencing after the pandemic.”

Sharper content organisation

With built-in technology including AI image recognition and facial recognition, Canto applies tags to visual files. This makes saving and searching for files straightforward and allows British Fencing’s team and external partners to work more efficiently.

“We add a lot of tags and it helps to find content when searching,” adds Sophie. “We tag items within the image, like the weapon and the project or programme. We also tag the different pieces of kit the athlete is wearing, meaning later we can immediately find an image tagged with ‘glove’, for example.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Daniel Sheridan .