Fashion Institute of Technology's Virtual Events Success

Education

How the Fashion Institute of Technology took their Events Virtual

About FIT NYC

The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is an internationally renowned academic institution focused on design, fashion, art, visual media, business, and communication. Part of their organizational mission and vision is to be an innovation center, working with industry leaders to address challenges and create a culture of creative innovation. The Institute opened in 1944 with 100 students across two floors of a trade-school building. Now, the campus has five academic buildings serving over 10,000 students across a New York city block. As part of the State University System of New York (SUNY), they are held to extraordinary standards for academic rigor, creative excellence, and a diverse empowered student community. TrueLoyal has worked with FIT and other SUNY schools for several years, providing social media walls for events and website embeds.

“I actually started using TrueLoyal a few years ago for a social media feed for commencement”, said Taryn Rejholec, FIT Manager of Digital Strategies. “Then I was challenged with virtual events we had never done before.”

COVID-19 required a change of venue for the school’s events program. FIT annually produces a variety of events throughout the year including graduation commencement, Accepted Students Day, fashion shows, and departmental showcases. Events bring excitement, engagement, and empowerment to students, making them a vital part of the FIT experience.

Given FIT’s long history of excellence in visual media, any platform they selected would have to support a variety of content while operating like a standalone website.

The first virtual event in consideration was “Accepted Students Day”; a day that normally brings incoming students to the campus to learn about university culture, academics, and participate in vital enrollment processes like Financial Aid. The activation was going to be video intensive and require the ability to direct a multitude of people through dozens of directions.

FIT found the perfect solution with the TrueLoyal Virtual Event Experience Builder (ExB). ExB provided a degree of flexibility and customization that made designing the virtual activation easy. Virtual Events created with TrueLoyal are beautiful, responsive, and require no coding to deploy. “It had all the elements I needed for embedding videos and galleries”, said Rejholec. “[Customer Success Manager] JJ helped us to make custom adjustments. He worked with the development team and was able to get things done.”

The team had some hesitancy about being able to rally and pull the graduation together, but with TrueLoyal Experience Builder, the tools were readily available to create Experiences in minutes that make memories for a lifetime. The Virtual Graduation Celebration used a variety of features from the ExB toolbox:

Submit a Post
Hashtag Aggregation
Countdown Timer
Customer Image Blocks
Custom Content
Visualization

After the success of the Admitted Students Day, much-lauded by students, faculty and staff, the FIT Digital Team built a virtual graduation celebration event. This graduation was inspired by student feedback on social media and, as such, had to be powered by social media.