Class Reunion Planning 101 (High School or College Reunions)

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...

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...

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...