Class reunions
Two hundred people who last heard from you in 2005
A reunion is a marketing problem disguised as a friendship problem. You have a stale list, no budget, and a message that has to survive being sent by someone whose number nobody has saved.
The problem
An unknown number, texting two hundred strangers at once.
This is the specific way reunions fail. Someone puts the whole year group into one message. It arrives from a number nobody recognises, addressed to nobody, alongside a hundred and ninety-nine other numbers. Half the recipients read it as spam. A few reply-all. Several leave. And the organiser concludes that nobody cares, when what actually happened is that the message never got a fair hearing.
The other failure is quieter. Class lists contain people who have history with each other, and a group thread publishes the entire attendee list to all of them before anyone has decided whether to come.
What it is for
Three sends that do most of the work.
The first contact
One message, sent as two hundred separate texts and emails, each with their own name at the front. It reads like a person got in touch, because one did.
Finding the lost ones
Send to every address and number you have. What bounces tells you exactly which twenty records are dead — the shortlist for whoever is doing the tracking down.
The countdown
Tickets, the venue, who has already said yes. Only to the people it applies to, so nobody gets chased for something they already did.
Why individual messages get answered
A name at the front changes the read rate more than anything else.
Type ::firstname:: and every classmate reads their own name. Any column of your spreadsheet works the same way — the year they left, the house they were in, the sport they played. One specific true detail is worth more than three paragraphs of nostalgia.
Messages go from your own number and your own email, not a service, so anyone who does still have you saved sees your name. And they go out one at a time with a natural pause between them, which is also what keeps two hundred near-identical messages from being treated as spam by the carriers.
The class list stays on your Mac. No account, no upload — which matters more than it sounds when the file is two hundred people’s personal contact details that they gave to a school, not to you.
Questions
What reunion organisers ask first.
›How do I contact classmates about a reunion?
Individually, and from a number or address they can identify. The failure mode for reunions is a group text from someone whose number nobody saved twenty years ago — it reads as spam and gets ignored or blocked. A separate message with their own name, sent one at a time, gets read.
›Most of my contact info is out of date. Does that matter?
It matters, and it is the real work of a reunion. Bring whatever you have as a spreadsheet — old email addresses and old numbers both — and send to both channels at once. Failures tell you which records are dead, which is exactly the list you hand to whoever is doing the detective work.
›Is a group chat not simpler for a reunion committee?
For the committee, yes — six people who all want to hear from each other is precisely what a group chat is for. For the two hundred classmates, no. They did not sign up to watch each other reply, and reply-all across two hundred people who last met in 2005 goes badly within the hour.
›How do I handle people who have not spoken to each other in years?
By not putting them in a room together. Every class has people with history — an ex, a fallout, someone who was treated badly. A group thread makes all of that everyone’s business the moment names appear. Separate messages mean nobody learns who else is on the list.
›Can I send different messages to different years or groups?
Yes. Import each list separately, or group them in your address book. The people who already bought tickets need a different note from the ones who have never replied.
Two hundred classmates, two hundred messages, one afternoon you get back.
14 days free, the whole thing. Then $12 a month.