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View Full Version : Talk to me about your high school reunion...



jerseygirl07067
09-22-2012, 04:02 PM
I am helping one of my classmates plan ours, it is our 25th. We had a very low turnout for our 20th, maybe 35-40 alum from a graduating class of 250. But a reunion company was used at that time and they did a bad job in trying to reach classmates, and did a fairly no frills event, so that might be why the count was so low.

Our class president is not planning our 25th and I never thought we'd have one due to the meager turnout at the last one. But someone in our class recently offered to do it, and a date was picked for Dec 1st - just over 2 months from now. I'm helping with some of the details. Just curious, those of you who attended your 20th or 25th, what kind of turnout did you get from your fellow alums? How big was your graduating class? I ask, because the person planning it is using Facebook as we have limited time and can reach so many people this way. A lot of people have verbally committed, and people seem genuinely excited to attend, and the number keeps growing. He only started doing this 2-3 weeks ago. We hope to reach most of the class by the end of the month with the info and then payment will be due mid october.

The issue is choosing the venue, because we have to estimate how many will be attending. All locations require a minimum and then of course there is a maximum limit too. The holidays are approaching, he wants to get it booked by this weekend. We want to book one large enough, but not so large we won't hit our minimum. There are 85 commited on FB 15 tentative. We talked about it today, and expect the amount will drop once people must actually commit and pay. However we still haven't reached everyone yet either.

Sooo, can you share your reunion numbers for me? Also, this is single 5 hour event. It's not a weekend long event, like some reunions are.

(It's been fun going back to 1987 in my head, thinking of another reunion!)

belovedgandp
09-22-2012, 04:47 PM
I have no experience on predicting your retention of those interested now with coming in a couple of months. That does seem like a hard time of year to get people to come. You'll mostly end up with locals, but even they will suddenly have holiday events creep onto the calendar.

I just went to my 20th this summer. Graduating class of 140 and about 60 were there. Only 20% brought spouses. That's a much better turnout than we had for our 10th reunion. It was a bit pricey at $75 per person - venue, open bar, light appetizers. I went solo. If there had been a family friendly event that same weekend we would have taken everyone to it.

They did most of the recruiting for contact info through Facebook. Then sent out an evite to include those not on FB also. The FB event was pretty public, so the exact details on where to mail the check and such were only on the evite.

jerseygirl07067
09-22-2012, 05:27 PM
Thanks. What type of venue was it? Hotel, catering hall, bar, restaurant, etc?

Just curious...and what part of the country are you in?

ncat
09-22-2012, 06:57 PM
I was in a class of 500. Only about 150 people (100 alums, rest spouses) came to our 20th. Tickets were pricey - about $100 a piece. We had about 200 alums in the Facebook group. I think the organizers did a so-so job of finding people, and definitely burned a lot of bridges with the 10th fiasco, where up until about 2 weeks before the reunion they only invited their friends.