#MarketingEventsAwards 2020 highlight: SMU gifts students a memorable graduation amidst pandemic

The global pandemic struck in January 2020, causing major disruptions to big scale events around the world. Also impacted was Singapore Management University (SMU) which couldn’t hold its annual graduation ceremony in early July – which is a key highlight of every students’ educational journey.

SMU won the silver award for best content creation for a virtual event and two bronze awards for Best Event for a Targeted Community and Best Government Sector/Non-profit at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s recent Marketing Events Awards.

Challenge

With the circuit breaker, everything had to pivot online and SMU found itself left with only 60 days of planning and execution, requiring extensive and tight coordination among 12 internal departments and external vendors, 60 staff members from three countries.

Moreover, all meetings had to be conducted virtually due to the current pandemic and it was of grave importance to put together a memorable virtual experience, without sacrificing the experience on graduation, all done on a tight budget.

Another tough reality that the brand had to face was the fact that the graduation event took place at a time when Singapore is facing the worst economic downturn in the country’s history since independence. Unemployment and retrenchments are a daily occurrence and company closures constantly hog the news. So it needed to find a way to motivate its graduates and aid in their career opportunities.

Strategy

The strategy was to replicate and mimic, as much as possible, the multisensory experience of attending a live physical graduation ceremony.

Graduation is a highly personal and emotional coming of age experience for graduates and their families. The question was: Using technology, how can the team, to the best of our ability, incorporate the various touchpoints and assets to meet these objectives and further amplify our event, to create a lasting memory as a result?

Execution

With social distancing measures in place, the digital space was fully utilised to create awareness and build hype by engaging student influencers to spread the word around and countdown to the event day through social media.

The team also wanted to offer graduates encouragement from the very highest levels in the country, the Minister of Defence and the Minister of Education graced the event as Guest of Honour and Special Guest. Given the graduates couldn’t collect their degrees in person, s a highly personalised experience was created, albeit virtually, which let their avatars grace the stage on their behalf.  A touch of realism was added in the creation of each individual avatars using selfies, capturing as much accuracy as possible, their facial features and skin tones, and customising the different coloured unique graduation gowns don by the full sized avatars, clearly depicting the schools they are from.

Also given the graduates couldn’t “do it for the gram” in real life, their avatars, on their behalf, struck a pose AR-style. And a virtual memory lane was also created to highlight their monumental moments, along with a virtual wall for their well wishes.

To retain some elements of the physical commencement ceremony, three virtual panel sessions were held to discuss on the future of jobs post-pandemic and 50 employers were rallied to offer jobs and internships at a virtual career fair.

Results

The results showed over 23,000 web impressions in eight weeks and 285,000 impressions on social media channels over 10 weeks. 90% of the students also indicated that they enjoyed reliving their SMU journey through the virtual ceremony and 70% ranked the virtual celebration four out of five.