Products, software and advice for planning family, military, and class reunions

How to Manage and Publicize Your Reunion

(With your own Personalized Website)

As any reunion planner will attest, the two hardest parts about organizing a class reunion is locating long lost classmates and marketing the event. As the Chair planner of all of my high school class reunions, I have spent many hours searching for my alumni and advertising the event.

Moreover, once I find them, getting them to make a commitment to attend and purchase their tickets is a job in and of itself. We at reunionplanner.com found a terrific site that will help create and manage a website that will organize your reunion plan and help stimulate interest.

MyEvent.com emanates from Montreal, Quebec in Canada. It's president, Rob Hirscheimer worked as VP of sales and marketing at a company that manufactured wood panels and components. When a webmaster friend was asked to design a wedding website, he challenged him to design a system to enable anyone to create a website. His friend did develop a prototype of an interface that worked. Eventually, they put their money where their brains were to see where this would go. By 2002, Rob and his friend left their jobs and hired 2 more people to begin MyEvent.com. They quickly expanded their platform so their customers could make a website for any event. Today, with 16 employees, his team includes programmers, designers, customer support and administrators.

Some advantages they see for their customers are that their basic services are affordable at less than $10 per month and you don't have to endure advertising as most other websites do. In addition, they have 7-day toll free customer support over the phone. Unlike some other services, there is only one fee for the website, and all of your guests have access. Customers can use a trial website and then go on to sign up. They have a team of developers that constantly come up with great new features, so we suggest you check back and check often.

"Having a reunion website is the best way to collect information from guests and disseminate all the important details everyone needs to know", Rob says. "In addition, it is a great way to collect money and create interest before the event. Our service makes it possible for anyone to create a great looking website without any [website designing] skills." Rob boasts that, "If you can send email or surf the web you can generate your own website."

They add an incredible 5,000 new customers per year. They are busy throughout the year except for December when people are more focused on the holidays. Although they are based in Canada, 90% of their business occurs in the United States, 5% in Canada, and 5% in the rest of the world.

Many of their customers (more than 50%) keep their websites going after the event. Once they have a community website with all their profiles and information, many decide to keep it going. They use it as a private social network where they can share news, plan events, and stay in touch, all with no advertising to endure and for a very affordable price.

A reunion website is crucial whether it is being planned by a professional or an alumni committee. It makes finding people and building interest in your reunion easier and the event more enticing. For me that is the best of all worlds.