Dreading your upcoming high school class reunion? For those of us at a “certain age,” the mere thought dredges up feelings about stature, awkward relationships, our first exposure to cliques, power and the cult of celebrity. These dark thoughts and feelings thrive in the void of information and connectedness. Just keep processing 30 year memories and grudges and assume no one has changed… that’ll get you through the event. Pleasant surprises are welcome but not expected.
If your class is like mine, at least a portion now regularly connects on Facebook. To engage our Facebook class group page, we organized a few happy hours. Happy hour attendees spanned cliques and social circles. Each gathering was filled fresh conversation and new points of commonality. We weren’t hashing over old stories as much as we were talked about our lives today.
We’re taking a shot at planning the 30th reunion and these are some web-based tools we use to reach out, listen and plan. Like any sound effort in 2012, we drafted a brief mission, and sets of values and success metrics.
Google searching classmates is a huge task. With a list of names with scant or very old information and a 30 year old yearbook photo, we’ve attempted it as individuals and a group. Sure there will be people who never surface, but we intend to give it our best shot.
Our Facebook community consists of about 150 out of a graduating class of 560+. This is our most direct and free way to share reunion information and ideas. It will be interesting to see how the new degree of familiarity, built through Facebook friendships, accelerates ice-breaking at our reunion events this summer.
Our Facebook community, through individual networks, encourages classmates to join Facebook and the group, and posts updates on the passing of classmates.
E-mails are important and these databases lay dormant for years at a time. We issued a “Here’s the Date and Tell Us Your Preferences” questionnaire via SurveyMonkey and are pleased with our list’s accuracy and number of responses. A majority of respondents told us that they prefer e-mail for their reunion information. We are a class that, for many reasons, has not totally bought in to the social network.
So our webpage will get built and our PayPal account created. We will proudly list a planning committee that represents names previously associated with cliques. We’ve grown up, we are parents and grandparents. We have pets and careers. Our school experience binds us. Jam-packed elementary and junior high schools fed our high school. Neighborhood families stayed put and they relied on one another.
Our planning committee believes those bonds are real and form the basis of a great experience and network. We are at a time in our lives when things to dread are real and unavoidable. A class reunion should not appear on that list.
