Website for international school graduation

Problem

The International School of Amsterdam is a premiere IB (International Baccalaureate) school in The Netherlands. They host great events but due to Covid they were forced to cancel their on-site student graduation that families attended. They needed a last minute solution for their graduation as they had less than 1 month to prepare.

It was my job to help them:

• Develop a platform to host a live virtual graduation
• Give them guidance on implementing some designs they wanted
• Help streamline a process of collecting materials (videos, pictures, bios) of each student
• Provide access to materials like school branded graduation materials, pages for students, and photos and recordings of events

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Solution

My game plan was to build a website and make it easy for the school's staff to load the graduation content. I decided to build the site with Squarespace because they had some experience with it already and it is quite easy for someone to jump in and start adding new content.

I decided to:

• Build website using their brand guidelines
• Create a simple user experience for staff to upload content to the website
• Develop multiple types of pages to house graduation materials that could be used during the celebration and afterward
• Manage all the IT demands (domain, hosting, software integrations, .etc) so that the school's IT department didn't have to get involved

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Results

After a 10-day website sprint, we had a website foundation that was ready for the staff to insert the content.

The virtual graduation was a big success. Families worldwide could cheer on and it felt like a triumph over the Covid lockdowns.

• Already 2 successful graduations and counting!
• Families really enjoyed celebrating this special moment
• The virtual graduation website has now become a new addition to paper yearbooks. More discussion will be built on this topic
• The communications team found it very easy to update the site

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