Making Commencement Registration a Breeze with Trellis Events

The Trellis team is eager to take full advantage of Trellis Events at this year's 159^th Commencement ceremony at Arizona Stadium. Building on last year’s successes, graduating students are now using Trellis Events end-to-end. Eligibility, registration, ticketing, and check-in are now seamlessly integrated together under one roof. The goal: to make the entire process easier and more efficient.

Trellis made its debut in managing a large-scale events during the Commencement 2022, having joined forces with Presidential Events after the registration process had already started. Trellis Events was then implemented to manage communication, generate QR codes for ticketing, and admit graduates into the event. This year, Trellis’s goal of being involved in managing the entire registration process using Trellis Events has come into fruition.

According to Kim Winchell, who manages customer engagement success in Trellis, the team needed to integrate three different components of the registration process to ensure success. The first step involved creating a database of eligible graduates from Fall 2022 to Spring 2023, which was done by pulling data from UAccess and inputting it into the Trellis system. This integration would enable the University to contact the correct students and notify them of their ability to register for Commencement.

In the second step of the process, the Trellis team integrated Trellis Events with Qualtrics, a software tool that allows for surveys and polls. Upon being informed of their eligibility for graduation, students are now required to complete a senior exit survey. This survey asks questions regarding the support they received from the University, their career outcomes, and their preferred methods of communication for the future.

Once the survey is completed and a student's status reflects this in Trellis Events, they are then able to register themselves and their guests for the Commencement ceremony. The registration information is then integrated into Marketing Cloud for communication management, the distribution of QR code tickets, and creating a database for volunteers to scan tickets at the ceremony.

“It’s how all of these parts are connected that allows this to be a seamless integration,” noted Winchell. “Using Trellis Events allows the University to communicate with students, have them complete the survey, and register themselves for the ceremony. Once they do all of that they are integrated back into the event so we can track further.”

According to Winchell, although Trellis provided the technical components for the project, the commendable work that went into constructing the backend of the Trellis Event could not have been possible without the significant contributions of Megan Forecki and Adam Brokamp, who worked on Qualtrics. Also, to be commended are members of the Commencement Team, which includes Claudia Davila, Dale Schoonover, Lindsay Shekleton, and Celina Andrade.

A QR code and an integrated map will be sent to students the day of Commencement to ensure that messages are at the top of their email boxes. Trellis worked with Arizona Mobile in creating the map to help students and their guests navigate campus on the day of the event.

As of this publication, over 3,500 students have registered for commencement, with over 12,000 guests.

The Trellis Team, along with volunteers, will be present during Commencement to help students gain entry by scanning the QR codes they were emailed earlier in the day. Volunteers will use an app on iPads provided by UITS to scan the QR codes. If a student's phone is dead, volunteers can also use a lookup feature to verify their registration.

“Making this process easier for graduating students is really what I'm excited about,” Winchell noted. “I’m sure that everything on the day of Commencement will run very smooth. In the end, I think the visibility Trellis can provide in this one-stop-shop has been fundamentally very helpful to the whole Commencement team. That's really my goal.”