We had an amazing 40th Reunion Weekend on October 17th with our main event drawing 260 people, including 200 classmates. 340 classmates (55%) have joined our site to date. There was a huge amount of energy, reconnecting, good feeling, and fun. There is no question that the social networking generated by the website created both a comfort zone and momentum that resulted in the huge success that we experienced. Thanks to classcreator for creating the tools to make it happen.

A few observations:

- Our website was not flashy but it had good content that I updated every month with an email to the class. We were able to create momentum and sustain it. This included our HS yearbook, feeder junior high school yearbooks, panoramas, feeder elementary school class photos, HS newspaper articles, a "remember when" photo page, and other HS and Jr. High memorabilia. Initially, I had lots of old You Tube tv, movie, and music videos that I gradually took off as I ran out of custom pages. I used Issuu as the 3rd party plug-in and was very satisfied with its ease of use.

- The biggest dead space that I had on the site was the Add-On Chat third party plug-in. It was too awkward to use even when opened in a separate window. You basically had to schedule a chat for it to work. Hopefully the new Classcreator Chat/IM will work better and work off the Who's Online function.

- Our forums were used moderately. When I used them to provide real time information about the details of the various reunion events (as suggested by classcreator), they were viewed extensively and people asked questions.

- I thought that Reunion Planner II, in general, worked smoothly. We took checks but pushed credit card payment and 90% used credit cards. The ledger function in Reunion Planner was superb and made the accounting function easy and straightforward. Trust me, you don't want to be tracking down classmates for payment and dealing with checks if you don't have to. We had 98% of our ticket sales in the bank before we opened the doors.

Most people had no trouble with the payment process. However, we did have a minority who had trouble completing the process and I would see where people would register but not pay. This could have been for a lot of different reasons (including saved carts), but on follow-up, many of them never saw the summary screen after clicking their shopping carts and didn't then get to the type of payment screens. I ended up emailing them instructions on how to amend their order or manually handling a check payment through the website. Some other administrators have reported people getting hung up in the system. Maybe some refinements would be helpful. Not sure.

The Reunion Planner II beta reports improved and proved helpful. They weren't perfect in generating names of those attending but were close enough for our purposes

- The feature that would have been most helpful - A name tag template integrated with the senior pictures on the website would have saved a huge amount of time. I would definitely move that task to the top in the priority list.

- Our biggest mistake - It was a huge one but it worked out fine. We underestimated the "class creator effect" and picked a hotel venue that could not handle the eventual crowd that we had generated. More on that in another post but suffice it to say that we had to pay a significant cancellation fee to move the reunion to another larger hotel in the same chain. Fortunalely, we were able to transfer over 60 hotel rooms without any problem.

We had a hugely successfull 50/50 raffle at the event which raised the necessary dollars to cover the unbudgeted costs (I had some donors in standby mode but we didn't need them). It was a tough decision to move the reunion, but I didn't want people to come in from all over the country, be packed in like sardines and not be able to hear themselves talk. The new venue was perfect. Plenty of space to dance, eat, mingle, and, yes, sit. Hey, after all, it was a 40th Reunion.

Again, this success couldn't have been done without the tools provided by classcreator technology and customer service. Thanks for your help and patience.

Thanks for the writeup Ben. Congrats on your successful reunion. Appreciate the followup on your experience as that's what's most helpful to us. I think we have most of the items you mentioned on the hit list but I'll review again tomorrow and make sure.

Yes, the integrated Live Chat system, starting in beta 2 tomorrow for anyone who wants on, will be a huge leap forward as constrasted with third party plugins such as Add On Chat, primarly because the internal chat integrates with the login system. It'll add a whole new dynamic to Class Creator sites.

Again congratulations on the reunion and thanks for your feedback.