Case Study: Greater Wichita YMCA achieves 20x faster footage retrieval and 50% lower costs with Verkada

How a Non-Profit Organization Deployed an Affordable, Scalable Solution Across Sites

The Greater Wichita YMCA, which serves over 300,000 people annually across nine branches, faced slow, cumbersome DVR-based surveillance that left all footage requests routed through IT and made finding, exporting, and sharing clips time-consuming and impractical. CIO Brian Pond sought an affordable, scalable alternative and selected Verkada’s cloud-based camera platform (including fisheye cameras) to replace the legacy systems.

Verkada’s solution centralized management, let local staff securely access live and recorded feeds, and simplified sharing (seconds to archive and distribute clips via link or SMS) while covering more area with fewer cameras. The YMCA reported dramatically faster workflows and lower costs — footage retrieval is about 20x faster and the deployment was roughly 50% less expensive than competitors — enabling staff to proactively monitor spaces, reduce incidents, and free IT to focus on other priorities.

Greater Wichita YMCA

Brian Pond

CIO and Vice President of Technology