Ondossagon Reunion

In 2009, several years after my high school closed its doors, a group of alumni from my high school asked for volunteers to help plan an all-school reunion for the following year. The school had never had a website, so I volunteered to build an e-commerce website for the school and the upcoming 2010 reunion.

The Goal

The website needed to function as a “one-stop-shop” for the reunion, providing detailed information about activities leading up to the event, generating excitement, building the first-ever database of alumni, selling event tickets & merchandise as well as other fundraising activities.

Results

An estimated 1,500 alumni and spouses attended the reunion, which is a remarkable number considering each graduating class had less than 50 students. The reunion was such a resounding success that the plans from this reunion were used to organize a second reunion 7 years later.

From the outset, the intention was that any money raised beyond what was needed for the reunion would be donated to the local community center.

We donated over $22,000.

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Case Study

Getting Started

Living more than 2,000 miles away from the school and the majority of its alumni, I collaborated with the Steering Committee via email and phone.

The first phase of the project was to locate alumni who had moved out of the area. The small school had been located in a rural area where families are large, more than half the alumni still lived in the area, and everyone is either a neighbor to or related by marriage to everyone else. Understanding how this community is connected, I knew a word of mouth campaign would be the most effective way to find everyone.

The school already had a Facebook page that was somewhat active but only had about 40 likes/followers, most of whom I didn’t know, as they graduated before my time. It didn’t make sense to run Facebook ads to locate alumni, so I started a word of mouth campaign on the Facebook page, frequently encouraging all of my former classmates to like the page and share it with other classmates.

Within 3 months the number of likes and followers had grown from 40 to 600. (It was a very small country school, so this is a significant number.)

In the early stages of the project, I advised the Steering Committee to poll all the various event organizers to find a single communication format that works for the majority of users. Facebook was by far the most used.

At this point, I established that communication should be limited to the three formats all alumni were familiar with: Facebook, email, and snail-mail.

With this insight, we began gathering everyone’s email address and mailing address.

The remainder of the project focused on creating a single portal for all users involved in planning the event as well as for those attending.

Data and images collected in the process were added to an online repository for the defunct school district. This spurred development of a school museum in the local community center, which is housed in the old middle school building.

Simple Design

The majority of alumni are Baby Boomers and members of The Silent Generation. This audience is not as tech-savvy as younger generations, so I designed the website to be visually simple, easy to navigate, meets the technological comfort level of the audience.

The completed design included colors and themes requested by the heads of the Steering Committee. The layout, site navigation, and copy are all mine.

Committee Webpages

As each committee was formed, I first set up a new email address within the site’s domain for the committee chairperson, then pointed all incoming emails to their existing personal email address.

This was done for a few reasons. In the case of personnel changes, it needed to be easy to change the final recipient of the emails (or easy to intercept the emails) in case of personnel changes. I also wanted to keep the committee members’ personal email address private while making it easy for these people to receive reunion-related emails in their regular inbox.

Considering the users of this site, I wanted to make the user experience as streamlined and easy to use as possible.

I then built a separate webpage on the site for that committee to help keep everyone on the same page with work progress, as well as a very simplified Gantt chart to keep tasks on schedule according to the Steering Committee’s needs.

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Individual Class Reunions

The “Find Your Class” link on the homepage went to a single page where all graduating classes were represented. When I was told a class reunion was in the planning stages, I reached out to the person organizing the reunion for details, then created a Facebook Group and Event for the reunion. I then added links for the Facebook Group & Event to the Class page on this website.

Other online activity

e-Commerce

Fundraising for this project was crucial to get it off the ground. As the former school building had been sold years earlier, a large space would be rented for the event. Local donors provided seed money to get the process started, and the fundraising committee created logo gear and other merchandise for sale ahead of the event.

Keep in mind that this was done in 2009, years before online shopping was widely used, and when there were only a few shopping cart options that did not require a good amount of coding knowledge. This was my first exploration into building a site with e-commerce, so I spent a few weeks researching various methods for building e-commerce into the website.

The criteria was that:
+ The funds had to be immediately available to the fundraising chairperson
+ It had to connect with the bank account used by the Steering Committee
+ The user interface had to be simple and secure enough for older alumni to use
+ I had to be able to build it with a minimal learning curve.

The most efficient method for me to use PayPal, so after learning everything possible about setting up a PayPal catalog, I performed the following tasks:

• Assigned SKUs to each item for sale, with a different SKU for each variation in color and size
• Gathered clear photos of the merchandise and wrote a full description of each item
• Designed a landing page for the shopping catalog along with a reassuring statement that shoppers would be taken to the PayPal website to complete the transaction, as this was still fairly new to many users
• Coded a “Buy Now” button for each SKU
• Wrote microtext to help guide shoppers through the purchase process
• Composed a branded thank you page for the buyer, to confirm the purchase
• Created an email redirect so all messages to the seller went directly to the head of the E-Commerce Committee

As the date of the event drew near, I added a large banner at the top of the merchandise page with a call to action for site visitors to purchase advance tickets for the event. This was promoted heavily on the Facebook page, on all the individual reunion pages, in emailed newsletters, on a banner above the fold on the home page, as well.

Lessons Learned

This was a huge project.

Many times throughout the process, I wondered if I had bitten off more than I could chew, but I thoroughly enjoyed working through each section of the website, meeting with the Steering Committee (via phone) to add new features or tweak existing portions of the site to meet the committee’s preferences, and finding simple solutions for complex problems.

I volunteered to work on this project before I was aware that marketing is my jam, so I find it interesting to reflect back on the processes I used and the end-user research I performed before beginning to see that my approach had a good foundation.

Setting up the PayPal shopping cart was my biggest challenge. At that time, the only other viable options for me to use were Etsy and Joomla, neither of which made sense for this project. While teaching myself how to build the store with PayPal, I collaborated with my dad, a semi-retired computer programmer, as I had no peers familiar with this process, and requests for other tech-savvy alumni to assist with the project were unfulfilled.

The user interface was designed as a visual editor (WYSIWYG) but testing the buttons and cart revealed small bugs that were finicky and hard to correct without being able to manually manipulate the code.

At one point, when I needed to walk away from the project for a few days and mull over how to overcome some of these issues, I realized that I should approach solving the problems as if it’s just a really complex puzzle game. I love puzzles, so this helped me also adjust my attitude toward this phase of the project from wishing I could throw in the towel to looking forward to working on the puzzle during every minute of my spare time.

Was I happy with the end result? Yes, of course. I’m thrilled the site helped the reunion meet or exceed all of its goals, so I see it as a big success. Would I do it again? Yes, in a heartbeat – but this time I’d find a team to help design, write copy, gather images, and manage all the little moving parts involved in the project. And if no team exists, I’d find some warm bodies interested in learning how to build a website and train them.

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As of 2020
I am still an active Facebook admin, uploading photos, answering questions, and helping people locate alumni. Last year, I began a project to collect digital files of all published school yearbooks and back issues of school newspapers, organizing them into Facebook photo albums and publishing them as I receive them.

When a visitor to the school’s Facebook page likes or comments on a post, I invite them to like the page if I see they’re an alum or family member of one. Our Facebook likes are now up to over 800, which may now include all surviving alumni, staff, and faculty.

The school email address still exists, and I occasionally receive requests and information regarding the school. Even though I live halfway across the country, I’m still one of the school’s unofficial historians and hope to rebuild the website for the next all-school reunion.

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Note: My work on the website itself was limited to the 2010 reunion, and the site was taken down after the event was complete. Another volunteer built a completely new website for the more recent 2017 All-School Reunion, which is still visible online today.