Class Reunion Planning 101 (High School or College Reunions)

A friend of this blog asked me today if planning a class reunion was similar to planning a family reunion. "Well," I answered, "planning a class reunion is no picnic." I believe school reunions are more challenging than family reunions. And I believe family reunions, for the most part, are just that - "picnics." 1. Class reunions are much larger. My class, for example, was 620 people, and it's a huge management effort to coordinate communication, databases, bank accounts, ticket sales, teams of people, etc. Planning the class reunion is a big management gig. 2. Classmates are not connected by family ties and therefore are not easily found, especially when women marry and change their names. That, in itself, makes a huge difference. Thankfully we have social networking tools - huge resources for finding classmates - like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Classmates.com, and Google to find people. 3. Once we found the right location, (in our case a hotel with

Why agonize about party favors for a class reunion? There are many ideas to kick around if you want to give everyone a little memento of the occasion . Make your decision based on the fact that a good percentage of them get left behind on the table. Why is that? It's mostly because people are milling around, saying a thousand good-byes at the end of the night. They are not at their tables, sitting like good little guests. They have long forgotten their goody bags or engraved mugs, and are probably too buzzed to care. That said, let's talk about some sweet ideas that don't cost too much. Our class had a lot of talented musicians who rocked out at the Battle of the Bands and the school dances. Some did covers. Others wrote their own songs. We are asking classmates to send music from their bands in any format to our engineering genius Larry. He's going to compress the music and put it out on a CD, and that will be our party favor, complete with a nice label. Again this req

For the most part, people put themselves out there. They paste their pictures all over Facebook .com, share their family photos on Shutterfly .com, and put their entire resumes on LinkedIn .com. Twitter.com will tweet every last breath you take if you let it: "What are you doing now?" "I'm breathing." It's all voluntary. It's all good fun, and it's a great way to let people know you're still alive and well. With the special interest groups, you can direct people's attention to favorite charities, important public events, (like the reunion) and track your favorite celebrity's page. But there are some people who have no interest in social networking and prefer to remain private. They have not succumbed to the idea of Twittering their private thoughts in 50 characters or less. And some don't want to have anything to do with the reunion. So be cautious about posting private information on the class website when you have control of it. Re

Lou posted a comment after the article Should I Be the One to Organize the Reunion? about all the fun activities he planned for the entire reunion weekend I agree. Why limit the reunion to four hours on a Saturday night? Make an entire weekend of it, making it especially worthwhile for those who have traveled a great distance and may be staying in the hotel. Here are some ideas to extend the festivities: 1. A Friday night pre-party bash. It could be simply drinks at the hotel lounge or a pot-luck picnic at a local picnic grove. Perhaps you'll want to get together at a local hangout of 'yore. Create a simple "pay as you go" experience for those who wish to attend. No reservations. No money collected in advance. Keep it simple and have fun. 2. Saturday morning. Be creative. Plan a golf outing, a hike, a basketball pickup game at the courts, a brunch, a trip to the zoo or a botanical garden. Small groups can assemble for inexpensive get-togethers. Find creative, inexpen

A contract is a legally binding agreement between you and the venue, be it a hotel, a restaurant, a resort, a caterer or other organization that's providing services . You will be committing to pay for "x" number of people at "y" price. If your contract specifies a minimum number of people that you guarantee, then you will be responsible to pay for that number. So if our minimum is 125 people and only 100 show up, the signer(s) of the contract is/are responsible for paying for those 25 people. At say, $50.00 a head, that would be $1250.00 you would still owe the venue. You don't have to pay tax for those 25 people, nor the tip (as much as 21%) on those 25 people. But you do have to come up with $1250.00 This is why negotiating to lower the minimum number of people to hold the room is very important. Now suppose you have a reunion planned and a contract signed and for some unforeseeable reason you have to cancel it. Well guess what? You are still responsibl

Your contract with your venue represents an agreement between the you (or your team) and the facility/venue. It outlines the specific conditions and services to be provided. Most contracts are negotiatiable so think of it as a "work in progress" that can be changed and adapted based on several conversations with your Event Sales Manager. And keep in mind that during these times of economic uncertainty, venues are tending to be very flexible. The idea is to create terms with which both sides are happy. So don't feel like you have to sign the very first document they put in front of you. I remember our last contract went through about 5 revisions back and forth before we signed. The following are points that can be negotiated: 1. The rate and the number of hotels rooms that will be held as a block for the classmates. Go for the lowest price you can and compare the price to other hotels in the area. The more rooms you can hold the better, depending on how large your class si

The place for the reunion is much more than a box to house "x" number of people for a party. Think about the following when you choose your location. 1. Keep your location relatively close to your school location, say within 20 miles. 2. Consider the advantage of having the reunion in a hotel that can accommodate people before, during and after the party. This is particularly helpful for classmates coming from a distance. 3. While the room isn't going to make or break the party, be aware of dingy lighting, run down appearances and by all means, check out the rest rooms to make sure they meet your expectations . 4. If you expect to serve liquor and food, make sure the menu suits your needs and don't forget that tax and gratuities must be added to the price per person. 5. Does that hotel offer other venues for getting together? Bars/pubs/lounges for Friday night. Restaurant services for brunches in the morning. You may want to schedule a whole weekend of activities ce

Your database, preferably a spreadsheet, should be comprised of information that is useful to you. You will use it time and again to send emails and snail mails to your classmates. It will also become the "master" list to check in classmates at the door on the big day. Each piece of information should be a separate "field" and will be searchable if necessary. Our fields were created based on the survey questions we asked. However, once we started collecting money from classmates, new fields were added. This is a sampling of the fields we used. Feel free to add your own. ATTENDANCE - MARK UPON ARRIVAL AT REUNION HIGH SCHOOL LAST NAME HIGH SCHOOL FIRST NAME CURRENT NAME EMAIL ADDRESS PHONE # HOME STREET ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP COUNTRY PHONE # STATUS (L,F,D) VOLUNTEER (JOB) (from survey) ATTENDING (Y, N) HOW MANY TO ATTEND? HOW MUCH PAID? (AMOUNT) If you have others you would recommend. Please add them as a comment.

Once the survey results are back and your search teams starts finding people, you need to put the information you collect somewhere. A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is an excellent tool if one person is doing all the data entry. But there are other online options which function much like an Excel spreadsheet that a number of "invited" people can use either simultaneously or individually to enter data "live." That means that several of you can share the database and enter data all at the same time. It saves itself. The shared database we use for our reunion is called Zoho Sheet, one of many Zoho offerings available for free at http://www.zoho.com/ . You can create, edit and access your spreadsheets from anywhere. And no installation is required. It allows for collaborative editing of spreadsheets where multiple users can work on a spreadsheet simultaneously . You can import existing Excel spreadsheets and also export your Zoho Sheet to Excel spreadsheets for

Tell the world about your reunion. There are so many channels to publicize it. 1. Tell your friends about progress using social networking sites: Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. 2. Create a special "high school reunion group" on these sites and invite your friends to it and update it with basic reunion information. 3. Place notices in your local newspaper. 4. Write op-ed pieces for larger newspapers. Perhaps an article about the significance of your reunion as related to the social climate now vs. then - or something like that. 5. Write a notice for your community access television station about the reunion: date, place, time. 6. Take advantage of any media outlets classmates might have. We actually were on the Today Show with Al Roeker talking to him on national tv about the reunion, thanks to our classmate who was director of the show. 7. Send regular email blasts to found classmates on your list. 8. Create a website with reunion information, (more on this later.) 9. Adver

Once we gathered a respectable number of email addresses for classmates, we put out a survey to all of them to gather detailed contact information and to collect preferences about the reunion. There are many online survey businesses on the web that are relatively inexpensive if you Google "online surveys." We used http://www.surveymonkey.com/ "Intelligent survey software for primates of all species." SurveyMonkey has a single purpose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily. You design your own survey and select from over a dozen types of questions, (multiple choice, rating scales, drop-down menus, and more...). View Example Survey Their basic service is free, but limited to only 100 responses a month. We chose the Monthly Pro option paying a monthly fee of $19.95 for only as long as we used it. There is also an unlimited, more expensive option. Here's is a sample of what our survey said: We have good, up-to-date email addresse

Give yourself enough time to make smart decisions. Allow: Build your committees - 1 1/2 years Start building the database of classmates - 1 1/2 years Prepare and send out your survey - 1 1/2 years Start looking for a venue - 1 year 2 months Start building your website - 1 year 2 months Book the venue/ sign contract - 1 year Block rooms at a local hotel - 1 year Open a bank account w/ checking - 1 year Start selling tickets on website & mail - 1 year Offer discounts to early birds 1 year - 8 months Hire DJ/Band/Entertainment - 8 months Launch the decorations committee - 8 months Buy/make party favors - 6 months Start planning retrospective video - 6-4 months Hire video co. to document party - 6 months Hire photographer - 6 months Make nametags - 2 months Plan &/or build centerpieces - 2 months Plan other activities on that weekend - 2 months Seating arrangements if desired - 2 months Plan menu - 1 month These are approximate start times. If you haven't allowed yourself enou

I had a funny email today from someone who tried to organize her grammar school's 50th reunion. After a year she said "we gave up. Everyone was either 1. dead 2. disappeared or 3. too dumb to open an email." So they had no reunion. What follows are some thoughts about how to put together a team so that you can succeed in finding at least two of the three: the "disappeared" and the "dumb." I mentioned earlier in one posting " Do It Yourself or Hire a Company? " how our search team was actually started by Steve, who was looking to build a database of people to build an audience for his singing duo "Steve and Steve." He had a vested interest in starting the list of found classmates, and found 250 of the 620 of them by himself. Now assuming you don't have someone like Steve to jumpstart you, you would do well to build a core group of interested classmates about a year and half before the actual date. You might want to get yourself