The end of school is typically one of the busiest times for marketing and communications teams. With final performances, athletic playoffs, class events, and of course, graduations all crammed into several weeks on the calendar. The multitude of events can overwhelm whether you’re a one-man shop or you have multiple team members in your MarCom office.  

With so many important events, how do you make sure you’re capturing them all and communicating your value and story to your community? It’s vital you stay organized, and it starts with a content calendar.  

Whatever method or tool you’re using to keep your content organized needs to allow you to plan ahead and be flexible with your end-of-year content. Coordinate with your school calendar and put key events on your content calendar so you begin thinking of what resources you’re going to need to generate content for the events.  

If it’s a big event like a graduation ceremony, how many days ahead are you beginning to promote it? How often in between? Do you have a day-of post? And then what’s your plan on posting images taken from the event? If you can turn your graduation or big events around in a day or two, that’s best – engage your audience while they’re still thinking of you and feeling good about the event.  

Don’t be afraid to post multiple times a day on your socials. We suggest posting no more than two times a day on Facebook, Instagram, and never cap content on X (Twitter). We like to get creative and stay flexible to fit all the content in with our drag-and-drop content calendar tool when we plan out our posts for the month. 

Two common pitfalls to avoid this time of year: 

1. Avoid flooding your social feeds with graphics. While it might be the quickest way to get those events on your socials, you’re not doing your school any favors in generating engagement or telling your story. Go into your archives and pull images from prior year’s events when you’re previewing an upcoming event so you can paint a picture to your community of what to expect. It’s easy to forget that these events are usually new to the audience we’re trying to engage with because on our side we rinse-and-repeat it every year. Don’t waste the opportunity to tell your story!
2. Don’t get tunnel vision with graduation-level events. While those events obviously deserve an above-average level of coverage and content, be sure to curate your calendar so that you ensure every event is covered, understanding that to someone that is the most important event of the month. 

With an organized content calendar, you can ensure you’re capturing all the important events and maximizing your unique end-of-year opportunity to intentionally tell your story to your community in a moment where they’re highly engaged. Stay organized and plan ahead so that your end-of-year season creates the most engagement possible and let those positive feelings your community has about your school propel you into summer.