I am the administrator for my specific high school class. I am also the secretary of our high school's alumni association.

The alumni association is looking for a better way to manage our database, and I thought of this site as a great way for alumni to "self-manage" their contact information. We already have perhaps a dozen classes that have created sites here.

I've been charged with asking whether our alumni association could pay a flat fee to cover ALL our school's classes for 5 years, and then have a linked database function where our secretary could access the databases of ALL our school's classes, as well as record donation history data by student.

Is this something you'd be interested in developing and doing a negotiated rate on?
Thanks so much.

(I apologize for posting this to the message board, but I kept getting errors back when I tried to use your "contact us" message functionality.)

Would you mind trying the Contact form again and pasting the error you are receiving here? A couple other people mentioned this too, I can't replicate it, and at the moment I'm in Orlando. I'd like to see the error you're receiving.

I'd like you to define EXACTLY what you'd like the system to do in terms of tying together single year sites. We can probably come up with something.

Well, wouldn't you know it, this time my message to "contact us" went through just fine.

Maybe the problem was that I was doing this from work earlier and now I'm home?

Anyway, we basically want every class to be able to operate completely independently (we would seed the database we have into each class site not already set up). But we want to be able to operate the database as a whole, making updates, recording donations to the alumni association, and pay one fee for all classes from our school to be fully functional for individual class reunion planning, payments, etc.

I know that I am new to this but I like the idea. Tying together the classes, yet, at the same time keeping them independent. Sounds like a great idea!

Hey Dawn and Brandon:

If y'all have a few minutes (...well maybe 30 - 45 minutes) you might like to read the following Multi-Year Forum Thread: Multi-year site potential Solutions

This is some background information on the Multi-Year Class Issues previously discussed.

Kudos,
CAV

We have the multi year system here of course. What you don't get with that is separate Admins having control over each of the class years.

One thing we never really anticipated was the number of classes from the same school that would join. One class joins, and the next thing you know 10 classes from the same school are all on board.

We can obviusly tie things together in any # of ways, I guess my question is this: Who gets to be "Super Admin" so to speak? If you have a dozen classes, and all of these individual Admins are used to running their sites just like they've been doing, are any of them going to be against the Super Admin concept? We can't really impose something new like this on people unless they're all in agreement, as it wasn't what they bargained for.

Having said that, theoretically if you can get every single Admin on board so far to all sign off on having a Super Admin, and all in agreement on who that Super Admin should be, there's no reason we can't come up with a Super Admin login system where one person could quickly move around all sites and see things at a master level. I'm sure the Super Admin feature set could grow to all kinds of things, but just to kick it off it could simply be a way of seeing and logging in to all sites.

If even 1 Admin wasn't in agreement with the Super Admin concept though, I can see this quickly becoming a real problem.

Brad Switzer wrote:

Brad ...

If Dawn could pull all Administrators together ... What about the Administrators from the same school in the future ??? Does the phrase "CAN OF WORMS" haunt YOU ???

I go back to my original forum thread comments about why YOU created CLASSCreator?

CLASSCreator is ALL about the "CLASS" ... Large and small !!!

The present Multi-Year structure on CLASSCreator is not set up for the CLASS ... it is just another vast Repository for classmates to wade through numerous announcements, count-down clocks and playlists that do not interest them. We signed on and my classmates signed on because our CLASSCreator site is about our CLASS. Yes, we support our School, but so do a dozens of other alumni and reunion websites. We want something SPECIAL, UNIQUE, CREATIVE and INTERESTING for our CLASS and our CLASS alone - and CLASSCreator is that vehicle.

My thoughts and concerns are still the same as they were back in March 2009: Multi-year Site Potential Solutions.

"I believe" ... I really do "I believe" in CLASSCreator.

Kudos,
CAV

Thanks for your comments CAV and for being a supporter. Gotta shoot from the hip real quick here, I'm in Orlando and have to leave for the day. So if anyone wants to disagree, do it now while I'm away. Here we go:

Actually no, no fear of can of worms, not in this case anyway. The simple solution would be that additional years added to the system could choose to run their own separate sites just like they can here or anywhere else for that matter, or they could choose to join the collective so to speak. I don't really see an issue there.

Believe me when I tell you your comment regarding multi year sites "it is just another vast Repository for classmates to wade through numerous announcements, count-down clocks and playlists that do not interest them" will and did in the past generate extreme disagreement from the classes running multi year sites. That thread even generated fear in some smaller classes that we were going to shut them off or change things on them, generating numerous private emails to us stating their opposition.

We initially created the multi year system for smaller schools that function more like 1 class, usually throw all year reunions, and people from different classes have known each other very well for a long time, often decades. For those classes the multi structure is just what the doctor ordered.

I should also point out that somebody running a multi year site, or us creating a new "Super User" login in no way impacts the way in which single year classes function. We're just meeting the different needs that are out there. In reality needs can be very different. From a business perspective we can either meet them or not meet them. If we don't, those with needs our system doesn't meet will just go somewhere else. And we'd really rather they get on board with Class Creator.

Having said that you are correct that the initial concept (and the predominant concept to this day) is that people will run sites here just for their own class. I'm just saying that doesn't always make the best sense for 100% of the people. So again, because multi year sites or super admins and whatnot in no way impacts what people are doing here with their single year class sites, I really do think it's possible to meet both needs. In fact at this point I think we could say we are successfully meeting both needs.

Thanks, Brad. The organic way that class creator has spread through my school is just as you describe. One class used you and gave you such positive reviews that it's spread like wildfire (10 classes so far). Our alumni association website reunion page recommends that people use your site already. Our school was originally known as Greensboro High School and then became Grimsley High School sometime in the 60s, I think.

I think that the alumni association super-administrator option could work, but that super-administrator would also need the ability to pull the entire database (for twice-a-year newsletter mailings), not just one class at a time.

I feel pretty confident that all the class administrators would agree to this, because the alumni association would take on the cost of footing the bill for ALL classes to maintain their class creator websites long-term (assuming we could come to terms on a fair whole-school rate).

Please be aware that there would potentially be individual class sites going all the way back to 1937 (72 classes so far). Another option would be to only do class sites going back to 1950 (the oldest class currently registered here) and then we'd keep a separate manual database for the classes before that.

The need that is driving us here is that our alumni association has such a hard time keeping an accurate database. Several of us on the board have used your site for our individual reunions and LOVE that it's so easy for people to keep their contact information updated themselves, and resolves the issue of begging classes to send us their updated information after their reunion each time. When classes do send in their updates, it's a HUGE task for someone to go into our database and make all the corrections.

Brad Switzer wrote:

I agree 100% that your multi-year structure is just the prescription that CLASSCreator and Doctor Brad should order for the smaller class schools ...

BUT, YOU (Doctor Brad) are going to need the "Judgement of Solomon" when YOU have groups of large Classes from the same School banding together under different Multi-Year Structures trying to carve out their own territory.

I refer to my early forum comments about "all" or "one" CLASS(ES)if they want to join the Multi-Year structure.

My Class of 1969 is a large class (635 classmates) ... we would love to have some of the multi-class functions: teachers profiles, search by letter etc., but we do not want to deal with the numbers 25,000+ classmates and 45 classes from our High School.

Brad Switzer wrote:

Now, yes ... I hope the future holds true.

Kudos again,

CAV

Remember ... Brad ... "I believe" ... The Class of 1969 is signed on to CLASSCreator and paid up until 2019.

But I do want to be clear. We have no desire to interfere with the individual design of the individual class pages. We don't plan their reunions for them and don't want to. There are 350-500 students per class from our school, so that multi-year option as currently set up does NOT work for us. All we're trying to do is figure out if we can use the functionality here to improve our Alumni Association database functionality and ease of updating to be more user-driven (though we would happily "seed" the database with what we currently have for each class not registered here already).
Sure, we could hire someone to try to program something that basically works like this site, but as Brad notes, if Class Creator can meet the needs of Alumni Associations without hurting individual classes (the LAST thing we want to do!), we'd love not to start from scratch!

It would actually be pretty easy, for starters anyway, to create one Super Admin login that could easily access all sites for maintenance and also email out to all single year sites at the same time. In fact we could probably do that in a few hours. I'd be happy to get you a $ for that as well as a one time subscription fee for all 10 Classes for the duration of your choosing. I think what I'd like to have from you and your class sites is a direct email from each Administrator acknowledging authorization for a super user to have Admin access to their site and also to email out to your database. If you can have each Admin email me privately and grant permission I'm sure we can do this for you.

CAV, as you're probably aware several tasks were pushed back a it this year as we worked with some other prime features people wanted, but the items we discussed in the other thread are on the dockett and coming. Those items, such as Guest Passes and Teacher Repository are all coming. Probably feels like a long wait I know, but those items really are headed up to the top of the Task List shortly. We just recently added 2 new programmers who are familarizing themselves with the system at this time. I think their impact will really be felt after Christmas as we work through several hundred Task List items and get some of the spinnoff systems underway. Stay tuned, I think 2010 is going to be a really exicting year around here.

KUDOS BRAD . . .

I only want the best for YOU and CLASSCreator ... and of course my CLASS.

I have no reason to complain about your support or your famous "TO DO LIST". I feel like many of the other Administrators, YOU allow us (Administrators) to appear to be walking on water in front of our classmates - when we (Administrators) know that it is YOU and CLASSCreator that is supporting us (Administrators) and not letting us drown.

I believe ...

CAV