Hi Pip,
At Oxford Falls Grammar we only launched our Alumni program a few years back. I got the luxury of building out our reunion strategy from scratch. I work a little at both ends the focus of graduating years is to provide a 1 year (school pays, Alum pay for drinks offsite) 5, year same as 1 year and plan will be to do usual from there ie 10, 15 etc. I work only part-time so we need to figure out resourcing if school plans to manage all the events into the future. I am planning on charging to cover costs for events 10 years onwards and optional donation. As my key focus is connecting ‘lost alumni’ so as I come across older cohorts with interest in a reunion I am helping facilitate these if I get a critical mass interested in the event. We garner that initial interest by sign up to a ‘holding event’ on our Alumni & Community site/portal. Plus we also invite Alum to volunteer for events related to careers and speak to students returning to the school (hopefully we can run these again on school grounds this year) For covid this year the Principal is keen to try and hold physical events. My proposed plan is to do this but switch to virtual (zoom) if we have a covid restriction that way we don’t cancel and still hold the event as planned. I need to prepare some more video based content to be ready for these events. I ruled out hosting an all-in reunion event mostly because the bigger the numbers the more complex the event. Most are happy with low key opportunities to get back together.
Happy to chat further if you need.
Merryn Parks, Oxford Falls Grammar merrynp@ofg.nsw.edu.au
