Graduation Ceremony Ideas – Engage Your Virtual, Live, and Hybrid Students

A graduation ceremony is an important event for you, your family, and your friends. You go on the stage to collect your degree. You notice your family and friends cheering for you and clicking pictures. The atmosphere is emotional since you leave a world behind.

But the pandemic has turned things upside-down, and with limited gathering prohibitions, educational institutes have been struggling to give a memorable farewell to their students.

But that hasn’t forged the excitement around the whole event. While the world is going hybrid, educational institutes are not staying behind. Instead, they organize hybrid graduation or commencement ceremony so the students don’t miss the experience.

Keep reading if you want to do the same for your educational institute.

Ideas To Organize Graduation Ceremony

1. Create Unique Hashtag For Students

Students love the internet. Every student has a social media account, and you can test the power of hashtags.

Creating a unique hashtag for the graduation ceremony would give a different edge to the whole commencement program. Students and their loved ones can post on social media using the unique hashtag. 

It is one way to create memories, bring the students and their loved ones together, and make sure they don't get distracted. You can also organize hashtag campaigns or competitions like the "best photograph" to encourage more students to post. 

You can collect these posts, and with the help of a Social Media Wall Platform like Taggbox display, display those photos on various mediums to keep the students active throughout the virtual events.

2. Display Social Wall In Commencement

The social wall is another unique tool to display the aggregated content created by the students during the commencement ceremony. You might be wondering, isn’t that exactly something a social media ticker does? Our answer is no.

They both are different; while a social media ticker only focuses on the textual content, a social media wall helps you create beautiful visuals with aggregated photos and videos and display them, as the name suggests, in the form of a social wall.

In addition, the Taggbox Display provides smooth embed options to integrate the posts created by students with the ongoing graduation ceremony effortlessly with easy steps.

They also provide a range of themes and customization options to grab the students’ and their loved ones’ attention, which will keep the virtual ceremony as lively as the traditional one.

3. Live Stream The Zoom Call

When it comes to a graduation ceremony, many people have involved the students, teachers, speakers, family members, friends, and performers; the ceremony is nothing without them.

So why not let technology help you? You can bring them all together, organize a zoom call, and live stream it during the ceremony. That would call for perfect hybrid graduation. 

Performers can perform, speakers can speak, and friends & family can cheer. Everything can happen within the zoom call. 

And when you project it during the graduation ceremony students will feel encouraged, keeping their true spirits intact.

4. Use Photo Booths

Have you ever heard of a Graduation ceremony without a photo booth? Photo booths have always been an attraction factor in every commencement ceremony, as they help students create memories.

Attendees don’t need to download any particular app as it runs on a web browser like Google Chrome or Safari. Students and other attendees can have fun clicking pictures and uploading them to a common gallery by sitting at their homes.

The photos can be branded with the educational institute logo and displayed on the Social wall, on their event displays, or on the social media page. 

Here are some of the success stories of the graduation ceremonies for you to get inspired. 

5. Use Social Media Ticker

In the previous point, we mentioned how to encourage students and their loved ones to create social media posts using your graduation ceremony’s unique hashtag. And we also suggested that you can display those posts through various mediums. One such medium is the Social media ticker.

A social media ticker is nothing but textual posts scrolling horizontally at the bottom of the screen. People display them during a live virtual event. And in our case, during the virtual commencement ceremony. 

It is likely to have various speakers during a commencement ceremony to inspire students one last time. You can live stream the speech of the speakers and run the social media ticker at the same time. You can live stream the speakers' speech and run the social media ticker simultaneously.

Social media tickers are attention-grabbing and come with a surety that the students will remain active throughout the speeches, no matter how boring they get.

6. Organize Fun Games And Quizzes

Commencements can be a little boring after a point because no one likes to sit and stare at the screen for so long. So to keep things moving, it is necessary to grab the attendees’ attention.

One such way to do so is by organizing fun games and activities. You can conduct fun and witty quizzes with the graduates like, who was the sleepy head of the class, or who was the teacher’s pet.

You can even play games like bingo or Pictionary with the other attendees to keep them entertained and make sure everyone is attentive throughout the virtual graduation.

Another engaging activity would be hat decoration or other activities for the students to make their graduation ceremony zoom call more interesting. 

7. Make Sure To Pre-Record The Ceremony

The best way to enjoy the graduation ceremony, the hybrid style has to be if you pre-record it so that it is available to re-watch again and again. You can record the entire live graduation ceremony and upload it on your institute's website. This way, the commencement can be enjoyed by the students’ relatives and friends. 

Not only that, but any prospective student who is exploring your website will also get to go through the graduation ceremony and understand the experiences you offer to your students.

Virtual & Hybrid Graduation Ceremony Success Stories:

1. UAE University Virtual Graduation Ceremony: Social Wall

UAE University is a very famous university in the United Arab Emirates and is also one of the oldest. 

They had successful graduation ceremonies in the last 40 years, until now when covid restrictions were high, and they could not gather the students in one place. But they didn’t lose hope, as they conducted the entire commencement ceremony virtually, with Taggbox.

They connected the students, performers, and speakers through a live stream and used tools like Taggbox social wall ticker and social media widget to collect and curate posts from Instagram and Twitter with their unique hashtags.

Taggbox helped them have a successful graduation ceremony, and with social media involved, they manage to create awareness and expose themselves to a much larger audience.

2. ICMS, Sydney: Graduation Wall

The impact of Covid-19 on large-scale events didn’t stop  ICMS, Sydney from giving farewell to their graduates. 

Although they managed to have a physical commencement ceremony, they decided to give a hybrid touch to it. 

They divided the students as per their courses and had three small gatherings in different time frames. Finally, they live-streamed the entire ceremony on Youtube for the friends and family of the graduating students to see.

To make the event more engaging for the students, they created a social wall in their commencement ceremony using photos and videos posted by students.

Over To You

Pandemic, or no pandemic, nothing can forge our celebrational spirits. We come to the end of the blog, where you got to know everything that goes into organizing a graduation ceremony and making it a successful one.

Implement these graduation ceremony ideas and give the students a farewell worth remembering.