City, University of London: creating an interactive online celebration

City, University of London used our Hijack platform in order to create an interactive online celebration for students who’s physical Graduation had to be postponed.

After the outbreak of COVID-19 towards the start of 2020, institutions have been rendered helpless by the inability to conduct any recruitment and teaching activities in person.

As we have moved through the year, more parts of the educational calendar have been affected: One of those being graduation. How can we recreate a physical graduation ceremony to the best of our ability in the online world?

🎉 Hijack is here to save the day!

City, University of London had previously used our Hijack platform to conduct open days and applicant visit days while the majority of the UK has been in lockdown. They had professional video’s produced, but rather than just uploading those to their website or to Youtube, they wanted to use a more engaging platform with additional content – and connect them with other resources they may interact with at a ceremony. They embedded Flipgrid with congratulatory video messages from staff and a social media feed with their #CityClassof2020 hashtag, as well as including news stories throughout the year and information regarding further study and careers.

For those unaware, Flipgrid is a system commonly used for uploading videos for assignments. It’s more widely used outside of the UK but City brought it in for the personal appeal it has and were able to embed this into the Hijack platform.

“After the cancellation of the physical graduation ceremonies, and after interviewing the students, we did like a survey basically, that went out to all the students and, and although most of them do still have a physical ceremony, and a lot of them still wanted some sort of way to celebrate them completing the year, they didn’t want to just wait until next year about anything.”

Abigail Williamson, Events Officer (Corporate)

The results

A success! City had around 3,500 students graduating this year and it’s estimated that the Hijack page, on its first day, was visited around 5,000 times while it was live. This shows that a large percentage of students attended their virtual graduation but also that a lot of other parties such as parents or other family members may have been viewing from other locations to join the celebration. There was also data from the Flipgrid platform in that the content and videos that were stored on there was viewed up to 17,000 times!

Talking to Abigail Williamson who is the Corporate Events Officer at City. We got some feedback of their experience of Hijack and some of the strengths:

• The Hijack was easily customisable and adaptable to the content we wanted to include.
• Our branding was pulled throughout the Hijack so no need to keep altering text and colours.
• The Hijack sat on top of our Graduation page so it was easy to direct attendees to the experience.