Dispatches from the commencement trail

At some point last weekend, The Grad Team photographed its 500th commencement ceremony of the year. I don't know which one it was exactly, we had so many running simultaneously that the milestone came and went without anyone stopping to count. We were focused on the graduates, not our back-of-the-baseball-card stats. That's how this stretch goes. You put your head down in early May and you don't look up until mid-June. It’s all about honoring the graduates, and nothing else. 

This commencement season is one of the busiest and most rewarding in the history of The Grad Team. Across the country, our photographers are covering ceremonies at dozens of schools, capturing hundreds of thousands of images that families will put on their mantle, graduates will post on social media, and schools will look back on fondly. 

We are chugging along at The Grad Team, here are a few notes from the road. 

‍A year with the new app

One of the things I'm most proud of this season is something our graduates and clients will never see. Over the past year, our full-time developer Dave Proctor built and refined a custom app that our photographers use in the field to communicate directly with our operations department back at Grad Team HQ. It allows data to flow securely and seamlessly, so our team can get to work on delivering photos to graduates promptly.

We piloted it last spring, expanded it through the fall, and this season it's fully rolled out. It sounds like a small thing until you realize what it replaced: phone calls, emails, things falling through cracks during the busiest weekends of the year. It's a well-oiled machine now, even when things are hectic. It has been a huge success, the kind of relentless work that The Grad Team does to ensure our clients and their graduates are happy. 

‍Handling one-offs with aplomb 

Running 500 ceremonies means building systems that scale. But every season brings one-off moments and requests that fall outside our normal workflow, and we pride ourselves on delivering what our clients need whether it’s a VIP or an emotionally-poignant moment. 

Drew Brees was the featured speaker at Purdue’s graduation this year, and we worked with our client at Purdue to ensure we captured shots of Brees the same way we could graduates—you know, photos that tell a story—and delivered them on a tight deadline to Purdue’s internal communications team. Everyone recognizes the name of a Super Bowl-winning quarterback. But the moments that stay with me are the ones you'd never read about in the news.

At UNC Greensboro, our photographers captured a mother accepting a posthumous degree on behalf of her recently-deceased daughter. Once I heard back from our folks in the field about the images they captured and the reaction from both the school and the families, I'll just say this: it stopped our entire team in our tracks. We don't always know the story behind the person crossing the stage. It might be a single parent. It might be someone who beat cancer. It might be someone who took seven years to finish. Our photographers are there for all of them, and the care they put into those images is the same whether it's a Hall of Famer or a first-generation graduate.

‍Photos in hand within 48 hours

Here's something we probably don't tell our clients often enough: graduates are viewing their photos within 24 to 48 hours of their ceremony. That's the direct result of the field-to-ops handoff working the way it should (thanks to our new app, of course). The photographer captures the images, submits their report through the app, and our operations team picks it up and gets galleries built and delivered. It's fast, it's consistent, and it's happening at a scale of 500-plus ceremonies and counting.

We're not done yet. The season runs through mid-June, and we'll have a full recap this summer with stats and lessons learned. But halfway through, the team is performing. I'm proud of where we are.

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