How to Celebrate Your Graduates and Athletes During COVID-19

Who You Should Recognize

Social distancing has led to more and more cancelled events like graduations, proms, athletic and academic honors celebrations, and Senior nights. When it comes to ways to celebrate, consider promotions to showcase students in all of these areas.

Here’s just a few campaign themes:

• Salute to Seniors gallery
• Graduation Announcements & Tributes
• Fan Choice Athletic Awards
• Senior Athlete Awards
• Prom Photos Galleries

WVNS-TV was able to secure $10,000 in revenue for their Senior Graduation gallery.

Which Sponsors to Pitch

Start by thinking about advertisers who want community engagement and alignment with these goodwill initiatives. These campaigns target a key audience of families within your community that advertisers want to reach. These community-driven advertisers are looking for ways to stay visible right now. They need to keep their names top of mind and also give back to the community that’s been so supportive of them.

Think about some of these larger advertisers in your market interested in these community-driven campaigns:

• Grocery and Specialty Food
• Healthcare
• Automotive
• Financial
• Education

WRAL-TV created this Senior Athlete showcase and secured a local loan company as the sponsor.

Many other local businesses are feeling the sting of these school event cancellations. These smaller businesses like hairdressers, florists, photographers, and restaurants are in desperate need of a robust email database to target when things start to get back to normal. Be sure to include and email opt-in and lead-generating questions for the business on the registration form.

How to Promote

The key is to think about all of the assets you already have and how you can to reach all of the people in your audience. Email is the best way to maximize engagement, so be sure you’re creating a robust email campaign to announce your campaign.

In addition, you leverage your digital and core assets for more awareness. Be creative! Can you create a special print section, a 30-minute special, or bumps in and out of your local programming?

Resources

Looking to quickly get started with one of these ideas? Be sure you check out our 500+ turnkey promotion library for ready-to-run, ready-to-customize contests you can get started with right now.

Plus, if you’re trying to deliver real ROI for your sponsors, be sure to download The Seller’s Guide. It’s your one-stop shop for everything you need to create a contest to drive measurable results for your advertisers.