Use Graduation to Reinforce Your School Brand

When forming a graduation committee, make sure to include communications staff to ensure your events incorporate your school colors and that any signage includes your school logo and motto. Your school or district comms pros may also be able to suggest experiential marketing tools like special lighting and art installations to create Instagram-worthy moments that attendees will want to photograph and share, extending your brand reach. In fact, one study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that simply taking photos during in-person experiences—visiting a museum, going on a bus tour or eating at a nice restaurant—actually enhanced the enjoyment of those experiences for the majority of participants. Why not take steps to make graduation more enjoyable for your high school seniors? Finally, your comms pros can create a hashtag so any media shared by you or your attendees can be easily connected online. (You can read more about creating experiences of a lifetime in the Summer 2024 issue of SchoolCEO Magazine.)

When you gather your entire graduating class at once, especially if you’re a larger school, it can be hard to recognize individual students. If you don’t already, encourage advisory groups, special programs or student clubs to throw smaller, more intimate graduation ceremonies to complement the main event. These create opportunities for more personalized recognition and strengthen individual students’ sense of belonging. They’re also better opportunities to reinforce their bonds with one another. And in ten years, it is those friendships that your alumni will remember fondly, not the A+ they received in U.S. History.

Digital yearbooks are a modern way to capture and share memories with young digital natives. Not only do they eliminate the need for printing and distribution, they’re much more interactive than their paper counterparts—allowing you to add music and videos. You can also include teacher or student testimonials. Or have art students design animations for it. Students can even “sign” each other’s yearbooks online. These keepsakes are engaging, indestructible and—you can project your digital yearbook on stage at the ceremony, reminding all your students, families and staff of all the good times you had together. 

When I was in the first grade, my class buried a “time capsule” that included our rudimentary notes and drawings. We dug it out again when I was in sixth grade—and though it was funny to see—it didn’t reveal a whole lot about me. After all, my first-grade self could barely write, let alone compose a thoughtful letter to future me. 

By high school, though, we’ve become people with full-blown dreams, personal style, attitudes and interests—people whose lives will change dramatically in the decades following graduation. And the older we get, the more nostalgic we tend to get. So to generate future engagement opportunities, why not create digital time capsules similar to digital yearbooks? You can record student messages, predictions and aspirations and schedule these to be "unlocked" during alumni reunions or milestone anniversaries. Alumni might be blown away by how different—or how similar—they were when they were teens.

If you have a significant number of people in your community whose primary language isn’t English, hopefully you are already considering how to host your ceremony in multiple languages—with a live translator or pre-recorded clips. If you haven’t yet worked that out, livestreaming your graduation ceremony could be a great option. It lets students or family members who can’t attend in person still enjoy the momentous occasion, and platforms like Youtube and Vimeo offer automatic translation for non-English speakers and captioning services for hard of hearing viewers. You can project your livestream during the ceremony to provide closed captioning to those in attendance. You can even archive these broadcasts on your school's website. 

Your alumni have the potential to be some of your biggest brand ambassadors, so it makes sense to use graduation to firm up your relationship with current and future alums. For instance, you can use graduation as the kickoff for an alumni mentorship program, formally connecting graduates with past alumni in related fields of interest. This shows your alumni how much you value them and shows graduates your commitment to supporting them beyond graduation day. It also creates powerful success stories to share with prospective families. You could also invite alumni from milestone years (like 10, 20 or 50 years prior) to the graduation ceremony and recognize them. This would be a fun time to unlock that digital time capsule you created. By bringing alumni and graduating seniors together, you implant an idea in young graduates’ minds—the benefits of continuing to be involved in your school community for years and years to come. 

By approaching graduation as a strategic branding opportunity rather than simply an end-of-year ceremony, your school can create meaningful experiences that celebrate student achievement while strengthening your institutional identity. Use your graduation ceremony and associated events to reflect your school's unique culture and values while creating memorable moments that graduates and families will associate with your brand for years, come whatever.