By Raymond C. Jones ’70, Class Agent
After our 55th reunion, we had a committee discussion about how best to maintain class engagement between reunions. We were facing two challenges in particular.
- One was reunion participation. Our 50th reunion was well attended; but, because COVID delayed it by two years, participation in our 55th was somewhat modest. In fact, quite a few people who normally attend every reunion skipped the 55th.
- The second challenge, or perhaps just a "pet peeve," was that so few people were submitting class notes.
Was this a trend? Should we get an earlier start ginning up enthusiasm for the 60th?
The updates that we do get make it clear that our classmates are still very interesting people. (Hey! We're baby boomers! How could we NOT be interesting?) We just needed a way to encourage more people to communicate.
The college offered to support anything we wanted to do. So, we gathered a triumvirate of volunteers to try some new approaches.
- Bruce Barton '70, our intrepid class notes correspondent, offered to do more direct outreach soliciting updates.
- My fellow class agent Joel Hamme '70 took on backing up Bruce's efforts with even more personal outreach.
- I myself volunteered to develop a new email newsletter that could be circulated maybe two or three times a year.
I've now sent out two newsletters (here's a link to the July newsletter). We've gotten a LOT of compliments, and an impressive number of folks have now submitted updates WITHOUT having to be strong-armed!
The college's alumni volunteer portal has been a big help. It provides all the personal contact info we need, which at this point is mainly current email addresses. Also, thanks to the portal, our newsletter can be sent to all classmates at the push of a button.
One thing that converted me from a "prospective volunteer" to a "willing volunteer" was a somewhat troubling statistic about readership.
“The average email message dispatched by the College will be opened by approximately 30% of its recipients. Emails sent by a classmate get opened at the rate of 70% or better!”
Some class agents use the portal to assist with fundraising efforts. That's obviously important, although our primary mission as class of '70 volunteers is to keep classmates engaged in the life of the college and informed about how and what their college friends are doing.
To summarize, the alumni portal is an easy-to-use tool that has any number of valuable applications. I personally am a Luddite when it comes to technology, but the alumni staff has been extremely generous in helping me learn to use the portal. What's not to like?
