Most photographers will tell you the same thing if you ask them honestly. The shooting is the part they love. Everything else is overhead. Ashley Siegert heard that enough times that she built an entire company around it.

Ashley is the founder of Vacanva, a platform that pairs photographers with nonprofits to run portrait-based fundraising campaigns. The model is built so that photographers show up, shoot, and get paid, while Vacanva handles everything else: client consultations, location scouting, permits, editing, gallery delivery, and mileage reimbursement. The nonprofits get an easy fundraising vehicle. The clients get portraits they actually wanted. And the photographers get paid work without the admin weight that burns most of them out.

Ashley came up as a producer and stage manager for ESPN baseball, building a portrait business in parallel and running at a pace that would have broken most people. When COVID killed her original tourism concept days before launch in March 2020, she pivoted into nonprofit partnerships with the organizations already in her orbit. The first campaign sold 20 packages. The next sold 30. Vacanva now has 75 photographers and is in conversations with corporate partners that could accelerate the whole thing significantly.

I met Ashley at WPPI a few weeks ago and walked away from that first conversation wondering how I had not heard about this sooner. This episode is the answer to that question.

What You'll Learn:

• How a last-minute COVID pivot turned a silent auction donation into a repeatable nonprofit fundraising model
• What photographers are actually paid and how session assignments work
• Everything Vacanva handles on the backend so photographers never have to
• What the staff portal provides before you walk into a session
• The corporate partnership strategy Ashley is building toward and why it matters
• What is coming this summer and why it is worth watching

Resources Mentioned:

Vacanva: https://vacanva.com

Connect with Ashley Siegert: Vacanva: https://vacanva.com

Connect with Matt: Website: https://generatorpodcast.com

Instagram: @generatorpodcast

Want to be a guest? https://generatorpodcast.com/apply/

Here's what I use to make Generator a reality:

SOFTWARE

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HARDWARE

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Small print: Some of these are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I get a small commission at no cost to you. I only recommend stuff I actually use.