Event page best practices
The following tips will help you make the most of your event listing on this site, and minimize confusion for your students and faculty.
Please communicate clearly with your faculty. If you are emailing faculty and directing them to RSVP for your event, you should not send them a link to the homepage of graduation.unm.edu. You should instead link them directly to your specific event page, or otherwise clearly and specifically instruct them how to sign up for your event. This is important to avoid confusion, reduce the amount of work faculty need to do to find the correct event, and ensure that they sign up for and rent regalia for the correct events.
If your faculty use the main commencement RSVP form to order regalia and then do not attend our event, we will bill those rentals to your department.
Add contact information to your department
From the "edit department" link on your department home page, you can add a website, email address, or phone number. This information will be posted to all of your event pages, and it is strongly recommended that you include at least an email address or phone number that students and faculty can reach out to with questions regarding your event.
Link directly to your event page
A common source of confusion is faculty and students RSVPing to the main University Commencement instead of a departmental convocation. To avoid this, coordinators announcing their events to their departments should always link directly to their event page instead of the home page of graduation.unm.edu.
The URL should look something like https://graduation.unm.edu/departmental/your_department/sp25/
If you are using our RSVP forms, you can also link your faculty and students directly to the RSVP forms for your event. Those URLs should look something like https://graduation.unm.edu/departmental/your_department/sp25/_student_sign_up.html
Add relevant information to your event page
There is a body content field on your event pages, and you should use that area to provide any information about your event that may be relevant to attendees. Some questions that you should probably seek to answer include:
- Is regalia required for students and/or faculty?
- What time should students, faculty, and guests arrive?
- How long will the event last?
An excellent example of an event that provides useful information and is written in an engaging voice is the Political Science Spring 2024 Convocation.
Enter events early
You should strive to enter upcoming events as early as possible. Ideally at least their dates/times should be entered in the first few weeks of the semester. You can even enter events far in advance. The event management page allows you to enter events as far as 4 semester in advance. If you have summer events you can even list them here to help users find out about them, but RSVPs and regalia orders are not available for summer events.