The Annual Giving Exchange

Here’s a question for those of us who work in education:  What will the impact of online social networking be on alumni reunion programs?

If the fundamental purpose of a reunion is to reunite old friends, I have to assume that the advent of online social networks will cause some change.  Now that alumni are able to stay connected on a daily basis through websites like Facebook and Twitter, will they still view class reunions as important in their personal lives?

I think that schools who have little reunion tradition or lack class affinity will steadily deemphasize reunion programming.  At those institutions where reunions have long been a part of the culture, however, I think the reunion as an “event” will no longer focus on bringing the masses to campus.  Rather it will serve as a platform to entice key volunteers and donors to campus so that they can participate in other key advancement activities (board meetings, commencement, etc.)

Annual giving teams will begin to see social networking websites as helpful tools for mobilizing volunteers and donors around class gift campaigns.  Assigning a list of classmate phone numbers to reunion gift committee volunteers will become passé.  Instead, we’ll ask volunteers to create class groups in Facebook where they can post messages about their class gift.  Or we’ll ask them to tweet about their class gift to their followers on Twitter.

And there is especially good news for those institutions that want to provide reunion programming to their alumni but don’t have it in the budget.  Online social networking tools may actually offer them a simple and inexpensive way to accomplish this goal.