It's been proven that getting your graduations images online and marketing them quickly, positively affects sales. The following is our recommend method for managing your CORE graduation events.
Why We Recommend This Process?
Because it saves you HOURS of labor and allows you to market your photos more quickly which in turn, not only increases sales but gets sales in faster.
Overview of the Selfie Registration Graduation Process
- OFFER: You need a good offer. We HIGHLY recommend using the CCS Preferred Offer with tiered pricing. Tiered pricing encourages faster orders as prices increase after 7 days and again after 14 days. We've eliminated late fees to reduce customer service calls and make the customer experience more friendly.
- BACKGROUNDS: If offering cutouts (PreRendered and Dynamic), we recommend pre-rendering 3 backgrounds. 1-Portrait Background, 1-School Logo Background, 1-Outdoor Campus Background. We then recommend offering 12 - Event Specific Dynamic Backgrounds. Don't show any of your rendered backgrounds as dynamic. Offer 12 unique backgrounds. We recommend 3 portrait backgrounds, 3 outdoor backgrounds, 1 additional school logo background that is different than the prerendered one, then a mix of grad specific or grad complimentary backgrounds. Click here to view some graduations backgrounds.
- CONTACT DATA: It's imperative that you get good up-to-date contact data. We HIGHLY recommend collecting your contact data via online registration. Online registration allows you to not only collect fresh data, but to collect multiple emails, cell numbers and optionally physical addresses for each graduate allowing you to market to more people.
- REGISTRATION SETUP: You can customize the registration page to meet the needs of your school. Registration can be done by sharing a single registration code with all or can be done by importing names and creating a unique registration code for each graduate, this includes placeholders in the event you want to use unique codes for each graduate but don't get names ahead of time. Example registration.
- CHECK-IN: It's critically important that you have enough staff and the staff is trained on the importance of getting the graduates to check-in/register. You need to staff so you have enough people to verbally and visually make contact with each and every graduate to confirm they have registered. If your are using Event Registration or Name Registration will determine the best method for communicating to the graduates about checking in and uploading their selfie image that will be used to ID other images.
- Event Registration: Everyone uses one code. Share the QR Code and/or link ahead of the graduation via email, text message, social media, posters, verbally, etc.
- Name Registration: (Required if using GradTag) Each graduate will get a unique card with their unique QR code, so you'll need to have staff to hand out the cards which gives them the opportunity to give each graduate verbal instructions to scan and check-in when they hand them their card.
- THE PHOTOS: We recommend taking as many photos as possible. More photos allows you to sell larger packages, which means higher sales.
- Candids Before Ceremony: Get candid photos of the graduates with friends and family as they arrive.
- Processional: Photograph each graduate as they process into the ceremony. Make sure these images are close-up and the graduate is looking at you.
- Speakers and Performances: Photograph all graduates that speak and/or perform.
- Overview: Get a good overview of the graduates
- Diploma/Handshake: Get a good posed photo of the graduate receiving their diploma.
- Portrait TKO: Take a photo of each graduate as they exit the stage holding their diploma on a white TKO background. This image should be cutout and rendered to 3 different backgrounds and offer 12 "event specific" dynamic backgrounds online.
- Recessional: If your ceremony has a recessional, photograph just like you do the processional.
- Celebration Photos: Take images of the celebration
- Family & Friends: Take more candids after the ceremony of the graduates with their family and friends
- UPLOAD THE IMAGES: We recommend uploading while shooting. This can be done via PhotoMatch by logging into the event and selecting ID by email/cell and just take photos and they will upload while you photograph. You just won't match it to any specific email or cell. If you can't upload while shooting, we recommend uploading immediately following the ceremony. Have a lead with a laptop or tablet that can collect the memory cards and upload the images before leaving the venue or immediately after. This not only helps you get images online faster but it helps with cutouts and renders so you aren't batching all your uploads.
- LOCK IMAGE FOLDERS: Confirm all images have been uploaded and if offering TKO/CK all images have been cutout and rendered, then lock folders and mark aligning complete. Note: If you use PhotoMatch to upload images, folders will automatically lock. If you plan to solely use face recognition to ID the images, you do not need to put images into different categories. Keep all images in the same view. If you choose to align images, rendered images will automatically ID if they are left in the same view category as the original images. You never need to align rendered images.
- RUN FACE RECOGNITION: Select the selfie folder as your reference folder, then select all other folders to run against the reference images to match faces. We recommend you allow the event to automatically be resync'd. You can edit the IDs after it runs if you wish, by viewing the job and making the necessary changes.
- ZCROPPING: Utilize zcropping to offer additional images. You can use auto zcrop to crop images with a single face or manually zcrop images with multiple faces. View the example event to see what zcropping offers.
- ENABLE THE EVENT AND START YOUR CAMPAIGN: As soon as the face recognition job is complete, enable the event and start your email/sms campaign.
We highly recommend the above method for getting your graduation images online quickly. If you are successful with your selfie registration/check-in, you should be able to get 100% of the graduates IDd using this method. If any graduates failed to register or upload a good selfie and you find a number of names did not get IDd to images, you can optionally go back and manually ID those images. Even if you can't get 100% using face recognition we recommend this method so you can start marketing to most graduates quickly, then go back and fill in the missing IDs. This will save time and labor and increase your sales.
In most cases, when following the above process, a large graduation can be IDd and online within a couple of hours of the end of the ceremony.
To view a detailed workflow, select one of the following methods below.
GRADUATIONS - Selfie Registration & IDing - Using an Event QR Code
GRADUATIONS - Selfie Registration & IDing - Using Placeholder QR Name Caller Cards
GRADUATIONS - Selfie Registration & IDing - Using Imported Names on QR Name Caller Cards
If you are a GradPics Now user, click here for information on GradPics Now
The videos below show the check-in process in action.
Event Registration/Check-In everyone scans the same QR code.
Name and/or Name Placeholder Registration/Check-In, each graduate has a unique QR Code.