Family reunions
Four generations, six group chats, and one person doing all the work
Every family has the one relative who organises everything. If you are reading this, it is you. The hard part was never picking a weekend — it is that reaching eighty relatives means eighty conversations, and only some of them are on the same app.
The problem
A family is the most fragmented list you will ever message.
The cousins are on text. Two aunts only check email. Your uncle has a phone that does not do group messages properly and receives every thread as forty separate photos. Someone made a Facebook group in 2019 that a third of the family never joined.
So the message goes out four times through four channels, and the people who miss it are always the same people — usually the oldest ones, who would most like to be included. Meanwhile the group chat that does exist has become a place where two relatives argue and everyone else has muted it.
What it is for
The three rounds every reunion actually needs.
Who is even coming
The first ask, months out, to everyone at once — by text to the cousins and email to the aunts, in a single send. Replies come to you privately instead of into a thread nobody reads.
The logistics
Beds, dishes, who is driving whom, what the Saturday looks like. Sent to the households it applies to rather than to all eighty people.
The chase
Three weeks out, twenty relatives have not answered. Message exactly those twenty, individually. This is the round that decides whether the numbers work.
Both channels, one list
Nobody gets left out for being on the wrong platform.
Human RM sends iMessage, SMS and email from the same list in the same pass. Text goes to the relatives whose numbers you have; email goes through your own Gmail, from your real address with your real signature, to the ones you only have an address for. Both arrive looking like you wrote them, because you did.
Family lists are also full of duplicates — the cousin saved twice under a maiden name, the couple sharing one number. Those get merged before anything sends, with a count of how many, so nobody hears the same warm note from you twice in a minute.
And every relative’s photograph is on screen before you press send, which on a family list is a surprisingly good way to notice you have left someone out.
Questions
What reunion organisers ask first.
›What is the best way to communicate about a family reunion?
Individually, across whichever channel each person actually uses. Family lists are the most fragmented lists there are — the cousins text, the aunts email, and two people still want a phone call. A single group chat excludes half the family by design. Human RM sends the same message as texts and emails in one pass, so nobody is left out for being on the wrong platform.
›Half my relatives do not text. What do I do?
Send to both. The message goes out as a text to everyone whose number you have and as an email — from your own address, with your real signature — to everyone you only have an address for. One list, one message, one sitting.
›How do I stop being the only person doing the chasing?
You probably will not stop, but you can make it take an hour instead of a weekend. The work in a reunion is not the decisions, it is the follow-up: who is coming, who needs a bed, who has not answered. Sending each of those privately is what actually gets replies.
›Will older relatives find a text from a list confusing?
They will not know it came from a list. It arrives in the thread they already have with you, from your own number, with their own name in it — indistinguishable from you texting them, because in every way that matters that is what happened.
›Can I message just one branch of the family?
Yes. Group your contacts however the family actually divides — by household, by branch, by who is coming Saturday — and send to that group only. Anyone can be left out of a single send with one click without being removed from the group.
Everyone hears from you. Even the ones who never joined the group chat.
14 days free, the whole thing. Then $12 a month.