After my experience with my husband’s 10 year high school reunion, I decided that there must be a world of seemingly smart people out there who need to be schooled in high school reunions. I’m no expert, but I can at least tell you what not to do– both from my own experience, as well as common sense. The following are some tips you can follow if you want to have a failure of a reunion… or, conversely, don’t do any of these if you’d like to have a decent high school reunion.
1. Expect the entire graduating class to find you on Facebook. If you are in charge of throwing a reunion, creating a group for your graduating class on Facebook is a great way to connect everyone, spread word about the upcoming reunion and surrounding events, etc. It is not, however, to be taken as the only method for which people may be informed of your event. This may be an internet age and it may seem like everyone and their mother uses Facebook, but this is not always the case, and furthermore, not everyone will think to look for you on Facebook. Not everyone wants to look for you on Facebook. Some people are too cool for these kinds of events. Remember the people who didn’t go to prom? Well, they aren’t going to join your high school graduating class Facebook page. You wouldn’t want to neglect to invite these people to the reunion, would you? If they receive an invitation, they might decide to come, but they’ll never know if you don’t reach out to them and tell them about it.
2. Expect all the people who did join your Facebook group to check it every day. If you are only posting updates to a Facebook group hoping all your members will receive all pertinent details there by checking with you every day, you’re going to miss a lot of people. I got my husband to join his Facebook group (he was one of those types that didn’t go to dances, games, or even have his picture in the yearbook), which I checked for him regularly because I wanted us to attend his reunion, and in the end it didn’t help; when I first joined, they had no news for me, and this carried on for some time so I spent maybe a week or two not checking in– and wouldn’t you know, they were already done selling tickets to the event by the time I checked back in, which offered no door tickets…. we were shut out, despite being a part of the group itself. When visitors check daily and regularly see no news, how are they going to know when there IS news? Don’t count on people to be psychically tuned in to your posts.
3. Expect people to find you online, but don’t send Evites. See above– this is a continuation of the above idea. So you’ve decided to go paperless. Either you’re really tech savvy or really concerned with the environment… or, could it be the less noble motive of being too lazy? Whatever the case, most people expect to find some sort of invitation to an event that is meant for them to attend. How is anybody supposed to know a reunion is even occurring if you don’t tell them? Facebook would be a great tool of collecting everyone’s information in order to send invites to as much of the class as possible, but it ends there.
4. Don’t send paper invitations. While it is kind to the environment to avoid mailing invites and it is a technologically advanced age that keeps us all connected better than ever, the most all-inclusive and expected way of reaching people is by paper invitation. You may use the internet and technology to gather data, and you can send recycled paper invitations.
5. Hold an expensive dinner at a country club. You know, when most of us haven’t seen one another in 10 years (or more, for other reunions), the most important thing is getting together and including everyone. I can’t think of what could divide us more than charging ticket prices that rival that of a U2 concert. Only those who are local enough, rich enough, and un-busy enough would shell out that kind of cash per person. I’d say if your prices are $50+ per person, you are trying to keep people out. If you truly must charge for your class to attend their own reunion, try to keep it more within everyone’s budget. This isn’t supposed to be a meeting of the most successful and wealthy of the class– try to include everyone. Consider that some are even traveling to attend, so their expenses should be taken into account. Most of us would be happier catching up with everyone in a community center over pizza than catching up with a small percentage at a country club over caviar.
6. Make the bar a feature. Lots of people love alcohol. However, this doesn’t mean that people attend their reunions to get drunk with one another. In fact, there are a lot of people who would ideally love to bring their children to their reunion. Reunions are all about catching up, talking about what we’ve been up to, how we’ve changed, and what we’ve accomplished. For many, their children are their greatest accomplishment and for some (like myself), their children come everywhere with them. Minimize the importance of drinking. Make it a family atmosphere to remain friendly and fun. This will make the event more accessible to everyone, from drinkers to non-drinkers to families. If drinking is that important to a few people, let them hit the bars after the reunion. There were several events surrounding my husband’s reunion, such as a cookout one night and a breakfast another morning, and more. You could even make one night a crazy drinking party night during reunion week, for the more wild crowd. Try and remember that intoxication is not on everyone’s mind.
Now that I’ve detailed how not to throw a high school reunion, here are a few refresher points that will tell you how to throw one without being a total and complete failure.
1. Take on the responsibility of locating as much of the graduating class as possible. You may use Facebook to find the individuals (many register with their class, making them an easy find), or you may create a group and watch people come to you. A lot of schools have sites or other ways that people have registered with them, to keep them up to date on their whereabouts and well being. It’s meant for precisely this purpose, so use it to your advantage!
2. Take the initiative to inform these people. If you don’t, it’s going to be only the people in your loop who attend, and then it’s not a high school reunion anymore… it’s a clique. That’s disrespectful to your graduating class and highly inappropriate. High school reunions are for everyone, and we all want to see everyone we went to school with. I can’t think of anything more boring than a party of only a small percentage of the people in the loop getting together under the bogus label of “reunion”. That’s incredibly dull! At the bare minimum, you could at least send e-vites, or…
3. Send paper invitations. Most people who will be able to attend or even consider attending have an address. Not everyone is into e-mail and Facebook as much as the next person, and this ensures that you include everyone. After all, what happens if the kid you sat next to in science class now lives in the mountains with no electricity? If his address were accessible, wouldn’t you want him to be invited? Which brings us to…
4. Be accessible to everyone. This is not the high school cool kids reunion, or the high school drama club reunion, or the high school class representatives reunion & friends. Like mentioned previously, this is supposed to be something for everyone. This is for the people who are doing well or just hanging in there, from the single mother of three with two jobs to the independently wealthy bachelor. The moment you start creating exclusivity, be it with the lack of info and invites circulated, the party atmosphere, or the high price tag, you no longer have a high school reunion on your hands.
5. If you’re too busy, pass it on. I heard the members of the “committee” of my husband’s reunion talk about how hectic life was, making excuses like how crazy it was to plan everything because of what was going on with them personally. This event isn’t for or about you and shouldn’t be at the mercy of a select few. If you have too much on your plate, pass your responsibility on to someone who can tackle it, and/or hire a coordinator. You have possibly hundreds, sometimes thousands of people depending on it. I’m a member of my graduating class Facebook group, and I’ve already had two planners messaging me trying to network or be hired. When I asked one if she was in charge of the previous reunion, she informed me that she had tried to help them but they had turned her down stating they would handle it themselves. The result of this? I went to a lousy after-reunion breakfast at a local restaurant with no one I liked present, and a sweet class committee leader who told me, “Oh well, there’s always the 25 year reunion.” Nice.
I’m actually glad I didn’t get to attend the actual reunion, though– I saw the pictures. It was a poor representation of the actual graduating class, representing mostly just the “in the loop” people involved in the process and their buddies. None of our old friends were there (they probably hadn’t heard about it, even though some of them and we had stayed local!), and it was just a small bunch of people we didn’t know or didn’t like having drinks at some country club a bit of a drive from our old school. No thanks.
In our technological age, you would think that since it is easier to locate and stay in touch with people from your past that high school reunions would be easier than ever to hold. You’d never know it from the way my husband’s high school reunion went down, which makes it completely shameful on the parts of those responsible for that farce. It was a complete and utter failure. Just think of how hard it must have seemed back in the day when we only had paper invites, when we literally hadn’t seen our old friends in 10 years– not in person, not on MySpace, nowhere! Yet, somehow these people in the past managed to locate, invite, inform, and include the graduates of their classes in successful enough numbers for the tradition to continue to flourish, so obviously it can be done. Just don’t make any of the mistakes these folks did.
