Online Yearbooks

There’s a group of kids in every high school class who run for class office because they think it will look good on their college applications. Then they discover that they’re going to be on the hook for planning school reunions every ten years for the rest of their lives. However, done right a reunion can not only be relatively easy to organize, but it can also give back to the community where you grew up.

The hardest part of planning a reunion is coming up with a program of activities that will entertain and engage your classmates when they return. Everybody has an opinion; everybody likes a different kind of music; some people don’t want alcohol there, some people do want alcohol there, and some people need there to be alcohol there. Pleasing everybody is impossible, and pleasing nobody is just about inevitable.

Luckily, we have been blessed in recent years with the advent of robust social networking. Social networks may be responsible for serious violations of individual privacy, but they are also hugely helpful in connecting people and planning events, making it possible to create events that are both more complex and easier to manage.

Anybody who’s ever attended a high school reunion knows that it’s hard to get started reconnecting with people. You walk into a huge room. It’s been ten years and you don’t know anybody there. You don’t even remember half the people’s names. You don’t know if you have anything in common with the folks in attendance. And yet you’re expected to jump in and start up conversations. Where do you start?

Breaking the ice can be difficult, but it’s important to remember that part of the ice in that situation is the size of the gathering. Any room that contains two or three hundred classmates, as well as their spouses, is going to be intimidating to all but the most extroverted people. One way to make it less intimidating is to reduce the number of people in attendance.

A good way to do that is to start the reunion with a distributed event instead of a massive one. For example, rather than renting a hall and hiring a band to play, you can line up a series of entertainment venues in a central area. With a little encouragement, local bars and coffee shops will get their own entertainment. You can create a group ticket that will give your reunion attendees access to all of those shows.

So the attendees of your reunion will be able to move from venue to venue, meeting up with different classmates at different locations, rather than having to walk into a huge room where everyone is gathered at once. Those classmates who want to avoid alcohol can stay in the coffee shops; those who would prefer to have a drink can go to the bars.

Of course, using social networking to plan school reunions does have a significant downside. While dramatically simplifying organization it also expedites communication, meaning that everybody on the periphery of the process will be able to share their opinions about what you’re doing.

For a good informational starting point, I recommend http://www.classmates.com.