Logo of Flipbooks AI
Logo of Flipbooks AI
GraduationFlipbookProgramEducationCeremony

Graduation Program Maker

Turn your commencement program into an interactive flipbook families open from a QR code as they find their seats with Flipbooks AI. The order of proceedings, the platform party, the full graduate list and every award citation live in one link that works in the stands, at home and overseas. Built for schools, colleges and universities. It is free to use, carries no ads and no watermarks, and sets no limit on the number of ceremonies you publish.

Graduation Program Maker

How to Make a Commencement Program

1

Upload the Program PDF

Upload the commencement program PDF your office already sends to the printer. Flipbooks AI builds an interactive flipbook preview straight away, with page turns you can test on a phone before anybody else sees it.

2

Brand It and Add Links

Set the page turn style and your institutional colours, then add clickable links to the faculty sections of the graduate list, the parking notes, the accessibility contact and the reception details.

3

Publish and Print the QR Code

Publish with one click, copy the link for the confirmation email, and generate the QR code for the seat backs and the entrance signage. Families scan it and the program opens in a browser.

How to Create a Graduation Program Flipbook

How to Create a Graduation Program Flipbook

Start with the PDF your office already produces for the printer. Upload it and Flipbooks AI builds the flipbook straight away, so you can try the page turns before deciding anything else. Set the look: page turn style, your institutional colours, the background around the pages. Add links where they earn their place, on the faculty headings in the graduate list and on the reception and parking notes. Decide whether the program is public or password protected until the morning. Read it on a phone the way a family in the stands will, because a two column graduate list that works beautifully on a printed spread can be hard work on a small screen. Publish, copy the link, and generate the QR code for the seat cards and the signage.

Create Your Graduation Program

What is a Graduation Program?

A graduation program is the booklet handed out at commencement. It carries the order of proceedings, from the academic procession and the invocation through the conferral of degrees to the recessional. It names the platform party, the speaker, the faculty marshals and the board. Most of it, by page count, is the graduate list: every name in the class, in the right order, with the right honours beside it. Then come the award citations, the prizes, the alma mater and the notes about regalia and the reception afterwards. Flipbooks AI takes that program as a PDF, exactly as your communications office exports it for the printer, and turns it into a flipbook with pages that turn, opened from a QR code on the seat back or a link on the ceremony page of your site.

Create Your Graduation Program
What is a Graduation Program?
What is a Graduation Program?
What is a Graduation Program?
What is a Graduation Program?

What Belongs in the Order of Proceedings

The order of proceedings is the part of the program an audience follows minute by minute, and it should read the way the ceremony actually runs. Academic procession. Invocation or land acknowledgement. Welcome from the president or principal. Greetings from the board. The commencement address, with the speaker named and a short biography. Presentation of candidates by the dean of each faculty. Conferral of degrees. Award and prize presentations. The alma mater. Benediction. Recessional. When every item is on the page, a family can see how far along the ceremony is, which is the difference between a restless hall and a patient one.

Create Your Graduation Program
What Belongs in the Order of Proceedings

Trusted by Fortune 500 Companies

Publishing a Graduate List Without Errors

Publishing a Graduate List Without Errors

The graduate list is the reason a program exists for most families in the room, and it is where a mistake hurts. Accents get dropped from names. A student who changed their legal name appears under the old one. Honours attach to the wrong line when a column breaks. Somebody who finished in August is missing from the spring list altogether. Read the list against the registrar record twice, and have somebody who did not typeset it check the column breaks on the final PDF. When a mistake does survive all of that, a flipbook is the one format where you can still fix it: upload the corrected file, republish, and the same QR code opens the corrected list.

Create Your Graduation Program
Why Commencement Programs Work Better as Flipbooks
Why Commencement Programs Work Better as Flipbooks
Why Commencement Programs Work Better as Flipbooks
Why Commencement Programs Work Better as Flipbooks

Why Commencement Programs Work Better as Flipbooks

A commencement program is printed weeks before the ceremony and is out of date the moment somebody finishes a final assessment or withdraws. Every registrar has a story about a name that had to be read out as a correction from the stage. A flipbook does not close at the printer. You upload a corrected PDF and republish, and the QR code on the seat back now opens the version with the right honours beside the right name. It travels too: grandparents watching the stream from another country get the same program as the family in row six, and an alumna looking for her own name eight years later still finds the link on the ceremony page. Most institutions print a shorter run and use the link for the rest of the hall, which is where the saving comes from.

Create Your Graduation Program

Awards, Honours and Citations in Full

A printed program cuts citations down to fit the paper. A flipbook has no page limit, so you can print the whole citation for an honorary degree, the full list of scholarship donors, the summa and magna and cum laude distinctions at a readable size, and the departmental prizes that usually get compressed into a footnote. Families who came to see one person read the citation for that person very carefully, and it is one of the few pages in the whole booklet somebody will screenshot. Give it the room it deserves, because here the extra spread costs nothing.

Create Your Graduation Program
Awards, Honours and Citations in Full

Graduation Program Maker Alternatives

Canva

Canva

  • Free & Unlimited
  • No Watermarks
  • Real Page Turns
  • Unlimited Graduate List
  • QR Code Sharing
  • Correct Names Late
  • Mobile Ready
  • Password Protection
  • Instant Sharing
  • Open Analytics
Flipbooks AI

Flipbooks AI

  • Free & Unlimited
  • No Watermarks
  • Real Page Turns
  • Unlimited Graduate List
  • QR Code Sharing
  • Correct Names Late
  • Mobile Ready
  • Password Protection
  • Instant Sharing
  • Open Analytics
Jostens

Jostens

  • Free & Unlimited
  • No Watermarks
  • Real Page Turns
  • Unlimited Graduate List
  • QR Code Sharing
  • Correct Names Late
  • Mobile Ready
  • Password Protection
  • Instant Sharing
  • Open Analytics
FlipHTML5

FlipHTML5

  • Free & Unlimited
  • No Watermarks
  • Real Page Turns
  • Unlimited Graduate List
  • QR Code Sharing
  • Correct Names Late
  • Mobile Ready
  • Password Protection
  • Instant Sharing
  • Open Analytics
Speakers, the Platform Party and Degrees Conferred

Speakers, the Platform Party and Degrees Conferred

The platform party page tells a hall of two thousand people who is on the stage and why. Name the president, the chancellor, the board chair, the deans, the mace bearer and the faculty marshals, with titles written the way the institution formally writes them. Give the commencement speaker a real biography rather than three lines, because families will look them up anyway. On the conferral pages, set out the degrees by level and faculty in the order they will actually be conferred, so the audience knows whether the master of science candidates come before or after the bachelors. It removes most of the questions a marshal gets asked during the ceremony.

Create Your Graduation Program

Features Built for Schools and Universities

Everything the ceremony needs is here at no cost. Link each department heading in the graduate list to the page where its citations sit, so a family can jump to their own section instead of scrolling past four hundred names. Embed a recording of the alma mater so people can learn it before they are asked to sing it. Link the accessibility notes, the shuttle timetable and the map of the reception. Put a password on a program that should not circulate before the day. Print the honorary degree citations in full, which never quite fit in a paper booklet. Nothing is watermarked, there is no page limit, so a class of nine hundred fits, and a university running twelve ceremonies across one week can publish all twelve for nothing.

Create Your Graduation Program
Features Built for Schools and Universities
Features Built for Schools and Universities
Features Built for Schools and Universities
Features Built for Schools and Universities

A Commencement Program Is Not a Yearbook

These two documents get confused and they do different jobs. A yearbook is compiled across a whole year, is full of photographs and captions, and is designed to be read slowly for a decade. A commencement program is a single ceremony document: it is authoritative, it is dated, and its job is to record who graduated and in what order things happen. That difference should shape the design. The program wants clean typography, a graduate list that scans easily, and nothing decorative standing between a family and the name they came to find. If you want the photographs and the memories as well, make a yearbook and link it from the back page.

Create Your Graduation Program
A Commencement Program Is Not a Yearbook
Correcting a Name After the Programs Are Printed

Correcting a Name After the Programs Are Printed

This is the situation every registrar recognises. The programs came back from the printer on Monday, and on Wednesday a student confirms that their name is spelled wrong or their honours designation has changed. With paper, the options are an insert slip, a pen, or an apology. With Flipbooks AI you correct the PDF, upload it over the old one and republish. The link does not change and the QR code printed on the signage does not change, so a family scanning at ten in the morning sees the corrected entry even though the sign was printed a fortnight earlier. Nothing else about the ceremony has to move.

Create Your Graduation Program
From Kindergarten Moving Up to Doctoral Hooding
From Kindergarten Moving Up to Doctoral Hooding
From Kindergarten Moving Up to Doctoral Hooding
From Kindergarten Moving Up to Doctoral Hooding

From Kindergarten Moving Up to Doctoral Hooding

The shape is the same and the scale is not. A primary school moving up ceremony is two pages, thirty names and a song. A high school commencement runs to a class of four hundred with a valedictorian and a salutatorian, the honour society, and scholarships listed by donor. A university convocation adds the mace bearer, the academic procession by faculty, degrees conferred by level, honorary degrees, and doctoral candidates with their supervisors and thesis titles. Flipbooks AI publishes any of them. You bring the PDF your office designed, and the size of the graduating class makes no difference to what the tool costs or to how long it takes to publish.

Create Your Graduation Program

Several Ceremonies in the Same Week

Large institutions rarely have one commencement. There is a ceremony per faculty, or per campus, spread across four days, each with its own order of proceedings, its own graduate list and its own signage. Flipbooks AI has no cost per document, so publish one flipbook per ceremony and give each one its own link and QR code. Families then get exactly the program for the ceremony they are attending rather than a two hundred page combined booklet they have to navigate. The events team can keep all of them live at once and update any single one without touching the others.

Create Your Graduation Program
Several Ceremonies in the Same Week

Who Uses Graduation Program Makers

2456+

Universities

6

Colleges

13

High Schools

24

Registrars

65

Alumni Offices

9

Event Teams

Bilingual Programs and Land Acknowledgements

Bilingual Programs and Land Acknowledgements

Many institutions publish in two languages, either because they are required to or because a large part of the community reads in another one. A flipbook handles this the same way paper does and far more cheaply: lay the two languages on facing pages, or publish two flipbooks and put both QR codes on the signage. The same applies to a land acknowledgement, an invocation in a language most of the hall does not speak, or a welcome written for international families. Putting it in the program rather than only saying it from the stage is what turns it into something people can read again afterwards.

Create Your Graduation Program

Families Read It on Their Phones in the Stands

A commencement audience is sitting outdoors in the sun, or in a hall with the lights down, holding a phone and a bag and sometimes a small child. Flipbooks AI is built for that. The program opens in the browser with nothing to install, the layout fits a phone screen, and a family swipes through the order of proceedings while they wait for the procession. Pinch to zoom on the graduate list to find one name among hundreds. Tap the link to the parking notes. Because the QR code printed on the seat back or the ticket goes straight to the program, there is no app store step standing between a grandparent and the booklet.

Create Your Graduation Program
Families Read It on Their Phones in the Stands
Families Read It on Their Phones in the Stands
Families Read It on Their Phones in the Stands
Families Read It on Their Phones in the Stands

Making the Program Accessible to Every Family

A commencement audience includes grandparents with poor eyesight, family members using screen readers, and people who cannot hold a booklet and a child at the same time. A flipbook helps: pages zoom with a pinch, screen readers can read the text aloud, and keyboard navigation works for anybody who cannot use a mouse. Design for it as well. Set the graduate list in a size that survives a phone screen, keep the contrast strong rather than pale grey on cream, and put the accessibility contact and the seating notes on an early page rather than the last one. Accessibility on a program is not a switch you turn on, it is a decision made while laying it out.

Create Your Graduation Program
Making the Program Accessible to Every Family
Reaching Families Who Cannot Travel

Reaching Families Who Cannot Travel

For international students in particular, most of the family is watching a stream from another time zone. Sending them the program link along with the stream address changes what they can follow. They can see the order of proceedings, know when their faculty is presented, read the citation for the award their daughter won, and find her name in the list at the right moment. It costs nothing to send, arrives instantly and works on whatever phone they have. This is the part of a commencement program that paper simply cannot do at any price.

Create Your Graduation Program
A Free Commencement Program Tool With No Watermark
A Free Commencement Program Tool With No Watermark
A Free Commencement Program Tool With No Watermark
A Free Commencement Program Tool With No Watermark

A Free Commencement Program Tool With No Watermark

Flipbooks AI is completely free, and free means the whole product: unlimited ceremonies, unlimited pages, no watermark across your seal, no ads beside the graduate list, and no upgrade prompt in front of the analytics. This matters more in education than in most sectors, because the program sits in the same budget line as the gowns, the sound hire and the chair rental, and that line does not grow. Publish the spring commencement, the winter convocation, the nursing pinning ceremony and the doctoral hooding, and none of them cost anything at all.

Create Your Graduation Program

Keeping the Program Embargoed Until the Day

Some programs should not circulate early. Award recipients are often confidential until announced, an honorary degree may be under embargo, and a graduate list carries student names an institution may not want indexed by search engines before the ceremony. Put a password on the flipbook and release it with the signage on the day, or keep it unpublished until the morning. Be realistic about what a password does: it stops the program being found and read casually, and it does not stop somebody who has the password from passing it on. For anything genuinely sensitive, keep it off a shared link entirely.

Create Your Graduation Program
Keeping the Program Embargoed Until the Day

What Schools and Universities Say About the Program Tool

We print four hundred programs for the graduates and the archive now instead of four thousand, and the QR code on the seat backs covers the rest of the hall. The print line on our commencement budget dropped by more than the sound hire costs, and not one family has asked where their booklet is.

Marketing team
Marketing team

Product catalogs

Two days before convocation a student confirmed that the spelling of her surname in the list was wrong. In previous years that meant an insert slip in every booklet. I fixed the PDF, republished, and the signage that had been printed a fortnight earlier simply opened the corrected version.

Studio owner
Studio owner

Client lookbooks

Half our graduating class has family abroad. We send the program link with the stream address, and parents in three time zones can see the order of proceedings and know exactly when their son is presented. It is the smallest thing we do for international families and the one they mention most.

School office
School office

Newsletters and programmes

I run commencement for six faculties across four days. Each ceremony has its own flipbook and its own QR code, so families get the program for the room they are sitting in rather than a combined booklet. Setting up all six took me one afternoon and cost the office nothing.

Independent designer
Independent designer

Portfolio flipbooks

Printing a Short Run and Linking the Rest

Printing a Short Run and Linking the Rest

A flipbook does not replace every printed copy and it is not worth pretending it does. Graduates keep the program, families frame it, and the archive needs a physical copy on decent paper. So print a short run for the graduates, the platform party, the archive and the donors, and put the QR code on the seat backs for everybody else. A run of four hundred instead of four thousand is a serious saving on a budget line that does not usually move, and nobody in the hall goes without a program on the day.

Create Your Graduation Program

Share the Program by QR Code Across Campus

The program needs to reach three groups: the families in the hall, the people watching remotely, and the graduates themselves. One link does all three. Print the QR code on the seat back card, the ticket, the entrance signage and the marshal handouts. Put the link in the confirmation email families already receive with their parking pass. Embed the flipbook on the commencement page of your site beside the stream, so somebody joining from overseas has the program open in a second tab. Post it to the class group so graduates can check the order they line up in before they are called.

Create Your Graduation Program
Share the Program by QR Code Across Campus
Share the Program by QR Code Across Campus
Share the Program by QR Code Across Campus
Share the Program by QR Code Across Campus

The Program the Archive Keeps

A commencement program is a record. It is the document a registrar goes back to when somebody asks whether a person graduated in 2019 and with what honours, and it is what the archive files every year. Keeping the flipbook live on the ceremony page gives you a second copy anybody can reach without a request to special collections. Keep each year rather than replacing the link, and the set becomes a small public history of the institution: who spoke, who was honoured, how large the classes were, how the faculties changed. That is worth more over time than the printing it replaced.

Create Your Graduation Program
The Program the Archive Keeps

Compare Commencement Program Tools

ApplicationRatingUnlimited CreditsUsage RatingDescription
10/10Yes1

Flipbooks AI publishes unlimited commencement programs for free, with real page turns, no watermark over your seal, a graduate list of any length, QR code sharing for seat backs and signage, and the ability to correct a name and republish after the signage has already been printed.

Jostens

5.2/10No2

Jostens is a long established supplier to school ceremonies, strong on regalia, diplomas and printed commencement stationery handled as a single order. What it sells is print and physical goods on a production schedule, so there is no interactive program a family opens from a phone.

Herff Jones

7.1/10No3

Herff Jones covers much of the same ground as a graduation supplier, with dependable printing and people who understand academic calendars. The workflow is built around a press deadline, which means a late correction becomes a reprint rather than an upload.

Canva

8.3/10No4

Canva is where many communications offices actually lay the program out, and it handles a long graduate list well enough. Its sharing side is basic: no realistic page turns, no ceremony ready QR workflow, and no reporting on whether families opened what you sent.

Adobe InDesign

6.4/10No5

Adobe InDesign is the right tool for typesetting a four hundred name graduate list, and most professional programs are built in it. It is a design application rather than a publishing platform, so it needs a licence, real skill, and something else to host and share the result.

FlipHTML5

7.8/10No6

FlipHTML5 has turned PDFs into flipbooks for years and does the core job competently. Free use brings its branding onto your pages and limits on what you can keep published, which is awkward on a document carrying an institutional seal.

Issuu

6.9/10No7

Issuu is a publishing platform built for magazines that want public reach, and it is good at making a document discoverable. A graduate list is usually the opposite requirement, and free accounts carry Issuu branding on what is meant to be an official record.

Publuu

8.1/10No8

Publuu produces clean flipbooks with useful link tracking and a straightforward editor. The parts an events team would lean on, longer documents and detailed statistics among them, belong to the paid tiers rather than the free one.

Microsoft Word

6.5/10No9

Microsoft Word is where a surprising number of school programs still start, and for a thirty name moving up ceremony it is a perfectly reasonable choice. It gives you a file to print or email, with no page turns, no QR sharing and no way to correct a copy already sent.

Printed Commencement Booklets

7.6/10No10

A printed booklet is what graduates keep and what the archive files, and no digital version fully replaces it. It also fixes every name at the moment it goes to press, costs more with every extra hundred copies, and cannot reach families watching from another country.

What It Saves a Registrar and a Print Office

What It Saves a Registrar and a Print Office

The cost of a commencement program is not only the print run. It is the artwork deadline four weeks out, the proofing rounds, the courier, the pallet of boxes in a corridor, the leftovers after the ceremony, and the reprint when something changes. Flipbooks AI removes most of that and costs nothing itself. It does not lay the program out for you and it does not check your graduate list, so your office still does the work it always did. What changes is the deadline: the file can be corrected the night before instead of having to be final a month ahead.

Create Your Graduation Program
See How Many Families Opened the Program
See How Many Families Opened the Program
See How Many Families Opened the Program
See How Many Families Opened the Program

See How Many Families Opened the Program

Flipbooks AI shows you how many times the program was opened, which pages held attention and where readers stopped. For a communications office this is the first honest measure of whether the QR codes worked or whether everybody used the emailed link, and it is the number that decides the print run for next year. Be clear about what it is not. It counts opens and page time, not people. It cannot tell you which family read which citation, and it should never be described to anybody as if it could. Used for the decision it is good at, it turns a print quantity that used to be a guess into a measurement.

Create Your Graduation Program

Advancement, Alumni and the Long Tail

A commencement program keeps working long after the platform party has left the stage. Alumni offices link back to it in reunion mailings, because a graduate who sees their own name and their own class list is far more likely to read what follows. Advancement teams use the citation pages when they write about scholarship donors. Prospective families read last year programme to see what the ceremony is like before they visit. Because the flipbook is a live link rather than a box of paper, all of that costs nothing to maintain, and the open counts show which of those audiences actually turned up.

Create Your Graduation Program
Advancement, Alumni and the Long Tail

Frequently Asked
Graduation Program Maker

What is a graduation program flipbook?

It is your commencement program PDF turned into a booklet with real page turns that families open on a phone. Flipbooks AI makes it for free, so a family scans a QR code on the seat back and reads the order of proceedings, the graduate list and the citations.

Is Flipbooks AI really free for commencement programs?

Yes. There is no cost, no watermark over your seal, no ads and no cap on pages or ceremonies. A class of nine hundred fits, and a university running a ceremony per faculty across one week can publish every one of them without paying anything.

Can we correct a graduate name after the signage is printed?

Yes, and it is the main reason institutions use it. Upload the corrected PDF and republish. The link and the QR code stay the same, so a sign printed a fortnight ago now opens the program with the corrected entry.

How do families get the program at the ceremony?

They scan a QR code on the seat back, the ticket or the entrance signage and the program opens in a browser. You can also put the link in the parking confirmation email and embed the flipbook beside the stream on your commencement page.

How long can the graduate list be?

There is no page limit, so the full class fits however large it is, along with honours designations, departmental prizes and citations printed in full rather than trimmed down to fit a paper signature.

Do we still need to print any programs?

Most institutions print a short run for the graduates, the platform party, the archive and donors, and use the QR code for the rest of the hall. The flipbook reduces the print run rather than removing it, and that is where the saving comes from.

Can we keep the program private until the ceremony?

Yes. Put a password on the flipbook and release it with the signage on the day, which suits embargoed awards and honorary degrees. A password prevents casual access rather than acting as real security, so keep anything genuinely sensitive off a shared link.

Can we see how many families opened the program?

Yes. You get the number of opens, the pages that held attention and where readers stopped. It counts opens and page time, not people, so it tells you whether the QR codes worked and how much to print next year.

Have more questions?

If you still have questions or want to explore more details about our features, limitations, and usage, we invite you to visit our full FAQ page.

Contact Us