Reunion Planning

[Ole Anderson]

A cousin I haven't seen in nearly 40 years sent me a Christmas card and asked in a hand wrtten note if I would be interested in a family reunion. I don't believe she is on social media nor did she offer her email address, so I need to get back to her via (gasp!) a written note. I have been thinking about getting together with all of my cousins and their families for years but never wanted to take on organizing it. I do have some limited interaction with a couple of them on FB, but beyond that, they have been strangers for 40 years. I am thinking that there must be some sort of social media similar to a FB group that allows one to set up a point of contact to reach out and gather in the brood, so to speak. A FB group would probably work, but are there more specific methods, like family-reunion.com (an actual site BTW) that would work better? Before I respond, I would like to have something specific in mind. What is your experience?

[Von Bickley]

We have two reunions each year. Covered dish meal with great food and great fellowship.

[Shawn Pixley]

I helped coordinate a reunion after a cousin's wedding. We used Email. But I have seen Evite (evite.com) or eventzilla be used for these things. Not really a social media site (I bowed out of these), but a site for coordination activities.

You may want to check sites like these out. I have no affiliation with any of the sites.

[Chris Padilla]

FB is your best bet. About 1/7th of the world's population is on FB.

If this was more school related, you could try out classreport.org

I used classreport before FB was known and it worked well. Now FB is it.

Good luck to you!

[Alan Rutherford]

I haven't organized one but have been involved in varying degrees in a few. I don't agree about Facebook unless you already know that all or nearly all of the people potentially involved are already FB users. It doesn't sound like that's the case. There are also many of the 6/7 of the world's population with a FB account who refuse to get one and it's not always from lack of computer literacy.

Assuming you're lookng at a few dozen people, not a few hundred, I'd go for the lowest common denominator and that's going to be email (with special treatment of the 1 or 2 without email). After you've collected enough contact information and have a better idea whom you're dealing with, you might look at something else, but starting from scratch you need to cast a wide net and keep it as simple as you can.