From shout outs to galleries, here are 7 ways to get your audience involved in your graduation coverage

It’s graduation season. Are you ready to help your audience find everything they need to know about the Class of 2023??

This is such a wonderful time of the year to showcase one of the biggest moments in someone’s life through galleries, lists and call to actions.

Here are a few of the things you can do to engage your audience with graduation coverage:

1. Photos, photos, photos

Get to as many graduations as you can and shoot as many photos as you can. If you aren’t able to get to a graduation, work with the school and/or reach out to parents who you may know who are attending. Aggregating content from parents, families and maybe even the school, may be an option, with social media posts.

Tip: Use numbers in headlines for the number of photos that you have in your story, if it’s an impressive number. A client of ours in South Dakota recently did that and the story really took off.

2. Ask for photos and shout outs

Invite parents on social media to share photos or do a shout out for their senior. We have created a call to action you are free to use on social media.?

Shout outs are lots of fun and for TV, this could turn into a nice on-air segment where you could run a scrolling list of them over several days.

Tip: Consider turning to Instagram to feature the shout outs, using their slideshow function to feature several callouts across a single post.

3. Run graduation speeches

Ask your school district if they would share speeches from the valedictorians and salutatorians. Based on the number of schools you cover, you could run these over several days.?

Tip: See if the speech is online somewhere that you can use. If you are a TV station and streaming this, just clip the speech with the story.

4. List honors award winners?

Many schools have honor award nights where they recognize scholarship winners and top academic performers. Ask your school district if you can get a list of all of those students and create a story or stories highlighting all of those local names.

5. Photos from wayback

Ask readers to share photos from their high school graduations (from the past) or ask public officials to share the advice they wish someone would have given them when they graduated from high school.

This could also be a great poll question that you could turn into a post.

6. Photos of all the grads

See if the photographer who shoots a graduation is willing to share the photos they have shot at graduations with you. Share where the photos came from (a link to the photographer's business as credit). If that's not possible, ask the school if there is a way to gain access to photos of all all of the graduating seniors (their senior class photos), along with credit.

7. Help families with planning ?

Create a variety of lists that make life easier on parents, like the best restaurants to take your graduate after the ceremony or places to get graduation desserts for a graduation party.

David Arkin Consulting can help your media company execute ideas just like this. Contact us today at [email protected].