BEST PRACTICES USING REUNIONDB TO INSURE REUNION SUCCESS Step 1: Decision and Comfort of Knowing You Have Our Help! The most important first step to begin the process of planning and organizing a well-attended reunion is deciding that you are committed to having a successful reunion. Part of our job at ReunionDB is to guide you along the way, and to help insure your success. Before you receive your database and have your formal training with ReunionDB, it is very important to NOT advertise any ticket pricing information on Facebook or any other location. If you have your reunion date finalized, that is the only important information that should be advertised before your training. Ticket pricing and your entire reunion marketing plan will be discussed in detail with you after your database is built. Step 2: Knowing What Your Starting Database Contains When we initially deliver your class database to you, it s important to know what you are starting with, and the process that we went through to build it. - All photos from your yearbook and the associated classmate names were entered into the database first. - Any additional names, middle names and middle initials were entered from your Graduation Program/Commencement Guide (if we received one from you). Without middle names and/or middle initials, locating missing classmates is difficult. - Any prior reunion contact information that we received from you was entered into the database from oldest to newest. - Any current contact information that you have collected, either in spreadsheets or manually, is then entered into the database. - Finally, we use an outside Search Service to see if we can find any missing mailing addresses and phone numbers, or a more current address than what we have in your database for all of your classmates. The only classmates who are NOT researched are those who you told us were already confirmed to be current. Even though the research we do for missing classmates is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate, most of the mailing addresses and phone numbers that are found are still very helpful for the initial build of your database and gives you a good launching point. Step 3: What To Do First After You Receive Your Database AFTER we have our training conference call with the committee members who will be using the database, you now have the freedom to access and update your data as often as you like, and you should be keeping your database as current and accurate as possible. You OWN this database and you can modify information, update/add email addresses, phone numbers and mailing addresses as you find or receive more current classmate contact information. The data entry team at ReunionDB is very conscientious about data entry and photo matching accuracy, but they are human and can make mistakes. If you see any typos or any data that you know is inaccurate, you can (and should) update or delete that data. If you see an incorrect photo on a classmate or an obvious duplicate record of a classmate, contact your ReunionDB support rep and they will get the issue fixed quickly. You will have the ability to ADD any needed additional classmate records into the database which may not already exist. For example, you may have some classmates who started with your class but did not graduate with your class. You may also have a classmate from another year who wants to attend your event or a teacher who you may want to invite. Copyright 2018 All Rights Reserved, ReunionDB Inc. (pg. 1)
Collecting accurate email addresses should be a continual process all the way up to your reunion date. Sending emails will be the most important and effective way that you communicate with your classmates, even if you are using social media sites to communicate with some of them. Start with your own address book, your committee s address book and also collect as many email addresses from your classmates who are on Facebook. Other sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Classmates.com are also good sources to find classmate email addresses. Another possible source for email addresses is the alumni association at your high school. Many schools keep their own database of contact information for alumni, and they are often willing to share that information with you, especially if you return to them your updated contact information after your reunion is over. You could also promise to donate a small percentage of your reunion proceeds back to your high school, to give them incentive to help you. Step 4: Set Up a Facebook Group Page For Your Reunion If You Don t Have One Already A simple Facebook GROUP page should be used to communicate with classmates who use social media, and to display information about your reunion (at the appropriate time). When you create a Facebook page for your reunion, it is recommended to NOT create an EVENT or COMMUNITY page because when classmates RSVP on the Facebook EVENT page, they may think they have formally RSVP d to the reunion. The place where they will formally RSVP and buy tickets is from the ReunionDB website. A Facebook GROUP page is what most ReunionDB customers create and is strongly recommended. Please do not post any ticket pricing information onto your Facebook Group page until we have completed our training session with you and your committee and have gone through your budget in detail. Generating buzz and excitement and anticipation on your Facebook Group page will help to drive ticket sales. Uploading nostalgic photos from your yearbook or any prior reunions always helps to get classmates thinking about coming to the reunion. When you do your Facebook posts (which you should do every few weeks), you want to always be positive, upbeat and never sound panicked if ticket sales are a bit slow. Also, to keep classmates from turning Notification OFF from the Group page, DO NOT post too much and too often. Classmates don t want to be pushed or oversold. ReunionDB has very specific content and timing for the Marketing type posts on Facebook and these will be reviewed during training and follow-up conference calls. Step 5: Set Up a Class Specific Gmail Email Address If You Don t Have One Already Most reunion committees prefer to NOT use their personal email addresses when sending out email blasts for reunion correspondence. Setting up a class specific email address is very useful and allows any or all members of the committee to be able to send and receive all reunion correspondence through one centralized email account. Gmail is by far the most flexible email account service to use and it s free to set up a new Gmail address. Try to keep the class Gmail account name as short as possible, but clear enough for your classmates to know that it s a class specific email address. You DON T want to make it reunion specific, instead make it Class specific so it can be used again going forward for future reunions. As an example, if your High School was Sample High School Class of 1982, your Gmail account could be SampleHS1982@gmail.com. All reunion email blasts send from your database will be (by default) sent from the ReunionDB email servers using your class Gmail account. There are also settings in Gmail that allow you to customize the name that appears next to the email address when sending out email blasts. For example, the from field of the emails that are sent could say SHS 82 Reunion Committee <SampleHS1982@gmail.com>. Copyright 2018 All Rights Reserved, ReunionDB Inc. (pg. 2)
Step 6: Determine Your Reunion Ticket Price (to be completed with ReunionDB) Your classmates are not deciding to come to their reunion because of a fancy venue. They are coming to see as many classmates as possible, most of whom they have not seen in over 10 years (or usually longer). Yes, they d like to eat decent food while they are at the reunion and not leave hungry, but they are not deciding to come to the reunion because of the food selection. Food costs can be kept reasonable by negotiating well with the caterer on the FOOD portion of the reunion because they make a killing on the high profit margin ALCOHOL sales. Times have changed A LOT for most people over the last 5 years. Cash is not as free-flowing as it used to be and many folks still live on a tight budget. The goal is to price your tickets so that the majority of the class won t say, I can t afford to come to my reunion. Those who are bringing a guest and possibly traveling in for the reunion have additional expenses to incur and whatever the committee can do to help keep the ticket pricing portion of their reunion expenses reasonable, the better off everyone will be. During your initial training conference call with ReunionDB, we ll be using the Planning Calculator that is built into your database to help you come up with an appropriate ticket pricing plan relative to your expected expenses. It is important that we do this together. The Calculator is found under the blue HELP button located in the top-right corner of your database. The calculator already has our per-ticket fee and deposit built into the calculations so you don t need to add our fees ON TOP of your ticket price when using the calculator. Do not GUESS what you think your ticket price should be! You want to back into your price based on your estimated expenses and estimated attendance numbers, while leaving yourself some cushion so that you do not have to come out of pocket for any reunion expenses. You can adjust your attendance numbers and ticket pricing for different what if? scenarios. If you decide to plan a pre-event, possibly the night before your reunion, it s important to not overshadow or negatively impact the attendance for your main event, especially if the pre-event has no entry fee or possibly a much lower entry fee. Many may choose to only come to the preevent, impacting your expected ticket sale revenue. Offering one price for both nights is a possible option, or waiting until after you have sold the bulk of your main event tickets before advertising or mentioning that there may be a pre-event on Friday evening for those traveling into town. The most successful reunion classes use a tiered pricing plan, meaning they will start with an Early-Bird Special price for the first X tickets sold or for the first X days of ticket selling, and then they will have a couple of small increases ($5 to $10) with deadlines for each increase as they get closer to their reunion date. If classmates don t have a reason to buy their tickets early, most will wait until the last minute to purchase. An Early-Bird Special also helps to bring some revenue in the door for any early expenses that need to be covered and more importantly, helps get the RSVP list growing quickly so that it can be advertised sooner. Step 7: Create a Simple 1-Page Digital Invitation A simple 1-page invitation (converted to a PDF file) will need to be created which contains all of your reunion details (date, location, price, etc) including information on how to RSVP and purchase reunion tickets. Your ReunionDB support rep will be emailing you sample Invitation templates from other reunions during your initial training to give you some format and content ideas so you won t have to start from scratch. Copyright 2018 All Rights Reserved, ReunionDB Inc. (pg. 3)
This PDF file will be made available on the ReunionDB Ticket Purchase Page for your classmates to view. After your Invitation is created, you need to send your completed document in PDF format to your ReunionDB support rep to have them enable your Invitation PDF link for viewing. This PDF file link (not the PDF file itself), will also be posted on your Facebook Group page and can be emailed from inside of ReunionDB to all classmates who you have emails for by using any of the Email Group options. You should never attach the PDF to your email, only include the link to the PDF file. If you are not sure how to post or email links to files instead of the actual file, your ReunionDB support rep will be showing you how. Step 8: Use the ReunionDB Phone Call Lists & Queries to Make Phone Calls Another very useful way to help connect with classmates is to use the ReunionDB phone call lists to call classmates directly or use auto-call sites such as www.call-em-all.com. Print Option (#2) gives you a variety of useful filter options when printing your call list. The phone numbers in the database came from either prior reunion information that was given to us, or from research that we may have done on classmates with no contact information. Always update and enter phone numbers as often as you can. The primary purpose of your phone call is to get an email address so you will be able to communicate reunion details to classmates electronically instead of by snail mail. Remind classmates that their email address is SECURE and PRIVATE and will ONLY be used for reunion correspondence so they can receive updates through email to help cut down on mailing costs. Step 9: Use Group Emails to Collect More Email Addresses & To Market Your Reunion One of the many benefits of using ReunionDB is the power of the Group Emailing tool. ReunionDB has a very detailed and strategic marketing plan developed for each class. This plan can be adjusted, depending on the pace of your ticket sales. No marketing or call-toaction emails should be sent from your database without reviewing the content and the timing with your ReunionDB Support rep! By default, all of your reunion email blasts being sent from the database will be sent using the ReunionDB email servers. If you prefer to physically send your own email blasts, you must have an email client installed on your computer. For Windows users, you will need the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook (2007 or higher) and for Macintosh users, you will need the latest version of Apple Mail on your computer. When sending emails from the ReunionDB database, if any of the emails bounce back because of a bad or undeliverable address, you should always correct or CUT that email address from the database so you don t continue to get bounce backs, and PASTE the bounced email in the Misc Notes field. You can search for classmates by their email address in ReunionDB (under the SEARCH button) if you can t determine who a classmate is by their email address. All of the Group Email options in the database have their usefulness as you begin to get classmates to RSVP. Committee members sometimes feel that they are nagging their classmates too much with repeated emails. The truth is, most classmates don t have their reunion at the top of their minds each day like the committee does and they usually NEED to be pushed and nudged along. Emails will only be sent to those who have NOT RSVP d and we won t be bothering those classmates who have already purchased tickets. If anyone gets annoyed with the reunion marketing emails, they will let you know and you can always check the Do Not Contact box on their record. Copyright 2018 All Rights Reserved, ReunionDB Inc. (pg. 4)
Step 10: Use the ReunionDB Mailing List to Send a Save-The-Date Postcard or Invitation Not all classes feel the need to send a snail mailer to their classmates, but it is still another effective way to spread the word about your reunion and to connect with those classmates who do not use social media and who you may not have an email address or phone number for. If you are going to send any snail mail, you have (2) options available with ReunionDB: a) You can print mailing labels directly from the database using Print Option (#1). Just purchase the Avery Laser 5160 blank labels and print your addresses instantly to your printer. b) An alternate way to send postcards is to use online services that will print and mail your postcards for you. You tell them what you want printed on the postcard and just send them your mailing list (an Excel file) which exports directly out of your database. Two companies that we know our clients use are Click2Mail.com and PremiumPostcard.com Contact your ReunionDB Support Rep for postcard samples and for the Excel Export file if you are going to use option b above. Step 11: Important Miscellaneous Reminders Remember that most classmates will only be motivated to act when given incentives to do so. Both positive and negative incentives work effectively. An example of a positive incentive would be something like advertising that you will be pulling (2) names randomly from all of those who pay this month to receive something at the reunion (Gift Card or a Free Reunion Ticket). Or you could discount your reunion ticket price by $10 for the first 25 people who purchase. Example of a negative incentive is advertising that you will be increasing ticket prices by $10 on a certain date and encouraging classmates to get their tickets purchased this month to avoid the higher ticket price. On average, some classmates will RSVP early, others will wait to see who is attending, and the bulk will procrastinate unless you give them reason to act. You need to stay in communication regularly (every couple weeks) with as many classmates as you can, using your Facebook page, phone calls, group emails, and possibly snail mail. The necessary tools to make these communication tasks more automated are all built into your database, and your Support Rep will be guiding you along with all of the above options. Your level of excitement about your upcoming reunion will help set the tone for everyone else s interest level. Once you get 25-30 RSVP s, we will start sending the RSVP list out with all electronic correspondences. This is a very effective way to stir up interest from that group of classmates who are waiting to see who is coming. The list of RSVP s link is always current and live so it can be cut and pasted anywhere as needed, including your Facebook page, a website or any online site. Classmates who purchase their tickets become very good sources of cheerleaders since they have already committed to coming to the reunion and they want to see a good turnout. Sending an email to these classmates and including the list of people who have NOT committed yet is a good way to have fellow classmates working for you when you ask them to help get others to RSVP and buy their tickets. Do not advertise or encourage tickets sales at the door. As you get to within a few weeks of the reunion, you can always let people know that if they show up at the door, their ticket will be $X which should be much higher than your normal ticket price. This usually gets most procrastinators to step up and purchase before the reunion night. A few people may still show up the night of the reunion without a purchased ticket. Use Print Option #5 and bring a wireless laptop/tablet running ReunionDB for registration check-in and for at-the-door ticket sales via credit card. Classmates can also now buy reunion tickets from their smartphones. Copyright 2018 All Rights Reserved, ReunionDB Inc. (pg. 5)
There may be some classmates who either do not use credit cards or are more comfortable paying by check instead of online. Those classmates will have to mail their checks to YOU (not ReunionDB) at whatever address you give them. On your invitation, you may want to have some verbiage such as: We are encouraging everyone to RSVP and purchase their tickets ONLINE with a credit card or debit card to help the planning committee manage finances electronically. For those classmates who need to pay by check, please make your check payable to X and mail it to Y. Also, be sure to include the name of your guest if you are bringing one, and also include a phone number and/or email address where we can reach you. If you receive a check from a classmate for a ticket purchase, you enter them as PAID in the ReunionDB database. To do this, you locate the classmate using the SEARCH button after you have logged in. On their TRACK tab, check the box that says Tickets Purchased. If they are bringing a guest and bought (2) tickets, be sure to check the Bringing a Guest checkbox as well and then make sure you SAVE the classmate s record. ReunionDB will collect their per ticket fee on CHECK or CASH transactions from a subsequent credit card transaction. All of the Email/Facebook templates referenced above and others will be emailed to you from your ReunionDB support rep so that you can view and edit them easily for your own personalized emails and Facebook posts. The content and timing of distribution for ALL of the ReunionDB Marketing materials is very strategically planned for each class, so it is very important to follow the lead of your ReunionDB Support Rep for all Call-to- Action correspondence to your classmates. A copy of your Strategic Reunion Marketing Plan outline will be emailed to you during the first or second conference call with your ReunionDB Support Rep. Regularly scheduled conference calls between you and your support rep will continue all the way up to reunion weekend to make sure the wheels of progress keep moving forward for the committee. Copyright 2018 All Rights Reserved, ReunionDB Inc. (pg. 6)