I'm curious. We crossed the 51% mark of classmates identified. (email addresses; phone number only; deceased) I wonder if that is average? We now have 131 of 258 people identified. This is our 40 year reunion if that make a difference. K

It's our 45th and we have 66% who have logged on! We have only 2 totally missing!

We have 31% of our class signed on so far but this has been done only by word of mouth. Our site was only started at the end of January so we are happy so far with the response. We are hoping to get up to 75% to sign on. We are in process of sending out postcards designed by me and printed at Vistaprint.com. For less than $20 we got 100 postcards printed with our class photo on them with an annoucement message about the new site as well as a message asking them to join us printed on the back side. All we have to do is slap an address label and stamp and send them out.

We just started in January and have 33% of our classmates now~ about 200 of 600. I'm getting ready to send out postcards, too. I'm hoping that helps!!

I've attached our postcards. I just made them myself.

I think the percentages are good. We are working on our 25th and are only at 41% and I've already sent out postcards from Vista Print.

It's our 46th reunion and we've located all but 5 of 368, thanks to a very tenacious search committee. They spent a great deal of time searching government records when snail mail didn't work. 53% are active on the site. The site was launched last October 1.

That is an AWESOME precentage. I'm trying to find someone in my class that is good with those kind of searches, because I have no clue where to start.

We (I mean the committe, when I say we) started with a list from the school, but it was pretty outdated. It did, however, give us a place to start. We did some Google searches, but that gave us very little. We sent out letters to everyone - some were forwarded or came back with a notice of the correct address. We asked people to give us info on other classmates - to email all the classmates you know and ask them for email address or snail mail addresses of class friends of theirs. We tried every email address we had access to. Our search team spent a lot of time calling every possible phone number. If they knew the name of the parents, they checked obituaries for the parent, as they sometimes listed the classmate and a city. Letters can be written to the funeral home with a request to forward to the classmate. Two of the team still lived in our city, and they went to the library and went to old phone books. (The school is in Wisconsin, but we had searchers thougout the country.) If someone had the name of a brother or sister, they tracked them down and called them - sometimes they were easy to find. One of the most unique pieces of info we got was from the former landlord of the ex-husband of our classmate - thus my comment on being very tenacious! One of our team went to possible addresses for the class member and talked to neighbors to get information - in the snow!
If you have someone who uses the government services in their work, they may be willing to donate the use of those services and search for you.
Our team was very driven and still are working on those last few people. Hope this helps some. We have been blown away by how hard this team has worked.

I am encouraged by the numbers reported here. Our site is only 10 months old and we have 139 of 606 (22.9%) registered and have identified 36 who have passed on. Our 40th is this year and I am shooting for 30-35% as we get closer to the reunion date.

One thing our committee did was print up business cards with the information and pass those along to classmates we meet....it has helped tremendously. Also we are calling those we have phone numbers for to remind them and update their addresses for the new registration mailing next month.

You might try www.Zaba.com for searches - it adds a DOB and also information updated date to the information. Very helpful.

Word of mouth (or should I say email) has been the best way to reach classmates who are not registered in our site. We have reached 72 classmates who did not respond to our 2004 (35th reunion) update.

Regards..........Patrick

We opened our site in January but we've had a very good search committee working for a year.

Our 50th Reunion is in late September.

Here are our stats as of today 3/14/09
Total classmates - 664
Found classmates - 543
Active classmates - 220 - 41%
Active guests - 19
Missing classmates - 57
Deceased classmates - 64

great post!

this is the exact reason why i choose the cc site to form our 30th which turned into a 31 year now termed the 'Thirtiest'
(but that's another story)

i looked at our past reunion planning company and all the large ones on the net. i corresponded with many and one of the questions i put forth was:
what % of turnout can we expect for our 30th...
it was like a recording, like every company was scripted in saying: you can only expect 20% to show, thats why you combine years, yada, yada

right then and there i decided we would take on the endeavor. to do it the best possible way IMHO was to find the best web site for reunions and well there you have it.

if you go by the 'professional company' opinions anything above 20% for a 30th is icing on the cake.

we are at 40% + with 6.5 months to go
you could do it all yourself mind you, however, many hands make light work, our class size was 575,
5% attrition in memory, so i knew we needed a large 'working' committee, we have 24 now and they are great.

read Reunion Magazine.com, there is a story in there of a guy that had over 100 on their committee and they found every single classmate and get this...every single teacher.
one of the news media picked up their story

reunion mag also features creating your site with CC!

WHAT? What do you mean Reunion Magazine features creating sites with Class Creator? If they did that's news to me. We're too darned busy developing features to market this thing. Fortunately it has a way of kind of marketing itself. We actually did just bring on somebody to help us promote Class Creator -- Nancy Jo Smith -- you'll be hearing from her shortly. Nancy is a fellow Administrator here and owner of a Communications and Advertising company.

B- I searched the net and looked into many sites including creating our own and happened upon an article about your site, after visiting your home page....well, that was it, I knew as I was creating our site having the promps walk me through it that...this just smelled right!

On the Reunion mag site I didn't think to copy the location and send it to you, if I see anything in relation to your site I'll be sure to get that info.
I went back on Reunionmag and looked around for a while, but their site is so large and I have time constraints like you and others.

Incidentally, they have a great time line with very useful information.

On a side note, I wrote the guy that had contacted 100% of his class (as I recall it was a rather large class) and had to commend him on such a great accomplishment. We exchanged information in a series of e-mails, nice guy.
Which reminds me I did bookmark that story. I'll look back to see what it said about the CC site if it still exists.

Sry to tread on this thread

We have 197 people in our class. Of those:

We have email addresses for 63% (123)
We have physical addresses but no email for 26% (52)
We have no info at all for 11% (22)

So overall, we've identified 89% of the class.

Of the ones we have emailed, 67 have registered on the site (34% of the class). We still have to send postcards to those with no email. Our site has only been active since March 5th.