Graduation season is a major keepsake and product opportunity for publishers

Pretty soon — actually like two months from now — high school and college graduations will take place in communities across the country and they offer a unique opportunity to not only showcase the special moments but to build products that readers will keep around forever.

I’m sharing these ideas today because these initiatives take some planning, alignment and advance work to make happen, meaning you can’t just decide to do these in late April and expect great results.

I’m going to focus mostly on product ideas that are keepsakes and how they can actually help attract a new loyal audience

1. Kindergarten (and pre-k) keepsake pages

One of my favorite photos of our kids growing up was at our twins’ pre-k graduation and I am sure if there would have been an opportunity to purchase an edition where they were featured in, we would have jumped at it.

This takes a lot of coordination but the idea is to create a yearbook of sorts for kindergartners through the pages of your newspaper or even e-edition. Most likely, you would need the images supplied but it makes for a very cute reading experience, one that advertisers would likely love to be around.

You could also approach this as a product that features many kindergartners from your community by inviting families to submit a photo along with a short write-up celebrating their child.

Here’s that photo I mentioned:

2. Class of 2026 graduation keepsake sections

There’s a lot of activity that happens around graduation so why not, similarly to the kindergarten idea, give parents some options on things that they could include in your graduation special.

• Congratulation messages to their children
• Announcements about where their kids are going to school
• Messages from grandparents, siblings or extended family members
• A short quote from the graduate about their favorite memory
• Favorite teacher or mentor who made a difference

Here’s an additional but related idea that works: Ask families to submit both a kindergarten photo and a senior photo so you could create a first day of school and last day of school special page.

If you don’t have a printed edition or e-edition, you could do something similar by featuring the promotions all on one page or section of your website, through call outs in your newsletter, carousels on social media or mentions in a TV broadcast.

3. Advice for the graduating class

These can be incredibly fun to do by tapping into teachers, alumni, business leaders and community members who can share short messages of advice for the graduating class. 

These could include some of the digital ideas I shared above (the carousel, the call outs) but also could make for a great list (100 pieces of advice our community has for graduates).

What would be extra fun is to have a group of graduates react to the advice in Reels (you would read the advice and ask for their take).

4. Personalized graduation posters

I love this idea of creating posters that are custom for graduates. This is actually an idea that you could offer throughout the year for athletes and those involved in extra curricular activities, as well.

News organizations that offer print are in a unique position to be able to offer this kind of product. The posters could feature a graduate’s photo, school name and graduation year.

5. The year they were born pages

It’s fun, especially if the page is saved, to feature what life was like the year that graduates were born (popular songs, shows, baby names).

You could also do this for this year and treat it like a time capsule page that graduates could open years later.

This is built around the idea of creating special moments that readers want to save.

6. Get photos, list of awards and speeches

There are some very effective ways to create content that readers will love flipping through but it starts by creating a partnership with local school districts.

Think about the following:

• Award lists from major schools (scholarship winners or a rundown of who is going to what college).

• Photos the school district is willing to share with you from graduations.

• Speeches from salutitorians and valedictorians (either text or ask them to create a video doing the speech).

• If you can get a livestream from the graduation, you should. There’s audience for this

Create a graduation hub

It’s important that it’s easy for your audience to find all of your great graduation coverage, so make sure you have a destination on your website that isn’t just a section that you dump all of your content into, but it’s laid out in a way that is easy to find things. Also think about the keywords people might be typing in to find coverage.

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