by France Cruz
MiraCosta College
Oceanside, California
A new commencement venue sounds exciting until everyone has the same questions at once: How do tickets work? Where do guests go? When should graduates arrive? What will the ceremony feel like in a new space?
This year, MiraCosta College in California moved commencement off campus to Frontwave Arena, a nearby sports and entertainment venue. We relied on social media to answer questions before confusion could set in.
The move pushed us beyond event promotion. We had to help students and families understand a new location, a new process and a new kind of commencement day.
Ticketing became one of the clearest examples of the importance of communicating change. In collaboration with Student Services, I helped produce short instructional videos showing students and families how to access, transfer and use commencement tickets through the app. We created the videos in English and Spanish, with captions and accessibility in mind, so guests could understand the process before they arrived. We shared the videos through email and social media.
That same audience-first approach shaped our live coverage, especially on Instagram, where our audience is most active. In the 24 hours before and after the ceremony, we kept our channels active with reminders, countdowns, student-centered reels, photo carousels, stories and recaps. Students and families saw the celebration unfold in real time, not days later.
During the ceremony, I took photos, offloaded them from my camera, selected images and posted while the event continued. Graduates were already sharing, tagging friends and looking for content that reflected their moment.
Still, speed did not mean posting just to post. We curate our feed with intention, and commencement is one of our most visible brand moments. Every post needed to feel like MiraCosta.
We also treated commencement like a creative campaign. I researched trending reels and formats, then reworked them to fit our students, our tone, and the new venue. Each reel featured our own students, which helped the content feel authentic instead of manufactured.
One reel I filmed, edited and posted became our strongest-performing commencement post. As of late May, it has 160,456 views, 108,354 accounts reached, 20,379 interactions, and 16,449 likes. More importantly, 97.3% of views and 98.6% of interactions came from non-followers.
From April 29 to May 26, our Instagram content generated more than 844,000 views, reached 278,700 accounts, and drove 41,600 content interactions.
The biggest takeaway? When a major event changes, social media becomes part of the event infrastructure. Frontwave Arena gave commencement a bigger stage; and our social strategy helped make that stage feel clear, personal, and centered on our students.
Dr. France Cruz is a marketing and communications professional at MiraCosta College, where she leads strategic storytelling across social media, digital campaigns, alumni communications, and community engagement. Her work focuses on clarity, accessibility, representation and connection. She was the NCMPR District 6 Communicator of the Year in 2023.
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