Whether it's a celebration of a five-year or a fifty-year milestone, an alumni reunion is a great opportunity for engaging and re-energizing your supporters.
Why? Because reunion events are uniquely positioned to reinforce the connection that alumni feel to your institution and their fellow alumni. Rather than focusing on the institution, reunions are centered on the experiences of the students who went there and what those experiences meant to them.
A sense of pride and attachment to one's alma mater can translate into lifelong support for the institution, but it has to be nurtured and reinforced to be sustained. That's where the alumni association and the reunion committee come into play.
In this post, we'll share five ways to motivate alumni at reunion events and amplify their sense of connection to your school (and to each other).
1. To Go Big, Go Small
While reunion events are typically open to alumni from all years, the context of each person's experience is often specific to their graduating class. While they may feel a sense of kinship with anyone who attended the same university or program as they did, they're likely to have a stronger affinity for a particular classmate.
To make sure those special relationships don't get lost in the crowd, you should provide explicit opportunities for former students from the same class to find each other and renew their bond. This could be as simple as organizing a photo for each reunion class. Boston College does this with each new freshman class. New students are invited to gather on the football field for the photo, and the time-lapsed video is shared on social media.
Consider organizing class parties and gatherings for alumni from the same class to reconnect. These small gatherings can be great opportunities for former classmates to reminisce about their time at the university.
During their Alumni Weekend, the University of Pennsylvania hosts several individual events for smaller groups of alumni, organized by class.
2. Create a Little Friendly Competition
While competition might be adversarial, the sense of belonging that your alumni associate with your institution will make it fun. It could take the form of a friendly sports competition, like a golf tournament or a 5K run, where alumni compete against each other.
Reinforcing the theme of class camaraderie, you could set up a challenge between classes from different years and encourage them to outdo each other. This friendly competition can be a great way to honor the reunion year and class year, while also boosting alumni participation.
Vanderbilt University runs a Reunion Cup Competition that includes a Reunion Attendance Cup for the class with the highest percentage of alumni attendance at the event, and a Reunion Giving Participation Cup that recognizes the class with the highest giving participation. They post the standings on their Reunion Cup page so alumni can see how their class is doing — and how it’s stacking up against the others.
The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University does something similar. Their Kellogg Reunion Cup Challenge ties their competition directly to their fundraising, with the award going to the class with the highest participation of giving to the Annual Fund. Each bar in the Class Standings chart links directly to a dedicated page for that class.
3. Establish a Unique Tradition
Some Homecoming traditions range from traditional (like the University of Iowa's Homecoming Parade) to eccentric (like Ball State University's Bed Race). But there's no question that the more unique a homecoming tradition is, the greater the impression it makes. Special events and traditions are a great way to celebrate your school and connect with alumni.
For example, the University of Central Florida starts every Homecoming Week off with a "Spirit Splash," where students all charge into the Reflecting Pond in the middle of the campus while the school's cheerleaders and football team cheer them on.
Kent State University in Ohio holds an annual "Kiss on the K" tradition, where couples who met at the school gather on the campus's K plaza and kiss their significant other at the same time.
Western Michigan University took it a step further during its Homecoming Weekend in 2016 when 1,201 alumni couples renewed their wedding vows, breaking the Guinness World Record for the most marriage vow renewals in a single ceremony. (Ironically, the previous record had been held by Miami University in Ohio, where 1,087 couples renewed their vows during the Homecoming Weekend in 2009!).
As part of their social media campaign to promote the event, they published a series of "WMU Love Stories" videos using the hashtag #BroncoVows on YouTube, in which WMU couples across all generations recounted how they’d met.
4. Encourage User-Generated Content
Since reunion events are centered on the personal memories and experiences of alumni, what better way to amplify those emotional chords than by asking your alumni to contribute some of their perspectives to the event? You can create a class book or a class page on your website where alumni can share their stories, photos, and memories.
You can ask them to post some of their favorite photos from their student days and create a montage on your reunion event page. If there's a particularly memorable event in your school's history, such as winning a state championship, you can ask your alumni to share where they were when they heard, and how they celebrated it. What's important is that it comes from them and that it represents an authentic aspect of life at your school.
In our post on the power of storytelling, we talked about the power of having someone tell the story about their experience with your school in their own words.
Wabash College does this particularly well with its Scarlet Yarns program. They invite reunion attendees to share stories about their time spent at the school in informal recording settings and post the videos to the school’s YouTube channel.
The interviews are conversational and relaxed and span multiple generations of alumni. Stories from older members of the alumni community help create a sense of belonging to a place with a long history. The Scarlet Yarns has become a staple of Wabash College Reunion events and the recordings are archived for posterity.
5. Livestream Your Event
Not everyone can make it to your event in person, but that doesn't mean they should be left out. Livestreaming special events, like the homecoming football game or class parties, can ensure that alumni who can't attend in person can still participate in the festivities.
Colgate University live-streamed their Reunion Awards Show for participants who couldn’t attend the school’s reunion in person. And Cornell University live-streamed the State of the University Address from their Reunion 2016 event.
As we described in our post on engaging your alumni with Facebook, Facebook Live is a great option for one-on-one interviews as a follow-up after a keynote speech. Anyone watching can submit questions live, and participate in the discussion from wherever they are. If you livestream select portions of your event, those absent alumni can follow along on social media in real time, or catch up later.
More Than a Trip Down Memory Lane
Reunions are one of the best opportunities you have to engage alumni from all generations. Reunions offer a wide array of programs and special events to connect alumni with their school, classmates, and the broader community.
Reunions allow alumni to reconnect with former classmates, faculty, and the university center, and they offer a chance to celebrate the class year and the lifelong connections formed during their time at the university.
Alumni reunions are a time to honor the class year and celebrate the bonds formed during their time at the university. By organizing special events, encouraging connections with fellow alumni, and creating unique traditions, you can amplify the sense of connection and motivate alumni to continue supporting your institution.