Getting the Class of 1969–76 onto Facebook. Frictionless? Way to go!

Hands up if you went to school. Now find everyone again.

23rd July 2016 will be our 40th anniversary of all finally leaving our Grammar School, setting off 172 of us on our various careers, gap years and universities. To some of us, it seemed to be a good time to have a reunion next year. Some would want to come, others would see little point, and yet more would be full of dread at the prospect. But the goal, at the very least, was to be able to send an invite out to an event next year to everyone we could find. A Facebook event page was duly set up, and off we went.

The number of connections of pupils to our school (be it under it’s Grammar School name, or it’s 1972 name change) was surprisingly light on Facebook. At first blush (after digging through all the Facebook ‘like’ associations), the populations looked like:

• Facebook: 476 (few attendance timescales, primarily married names)
• FriendsReunited: 2,926 (segmented by year leaving, inc maiden names)
• LinkedIn: 1,566 (few attendance timescales, primarily married names)

Fortunately, we built a full year pupil list based on our own memories, supplemented by a mid-1990’s 20 year reunion list attempt. Finally capped by a programme from a “Minotaur” Play put together in our 4th year, where every single pupil in the school year was both involved and duly accredited. All entered on a Google Docs spreadsheet that we could all share and contribute intelligence to: Christian Name, Maiden Name, Married name, School House, Last known location, Facebook URL, Email address, LinkedIn URL and supplementary notes.

Resources used were:

• Facebook Find Friend Browser (https://www.facebook.com/find-friends/browser/)
• LinkedIn Advanced Search (https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?adv=true&trk=advsrch)
• Whitepages (www.whitepages.co.uk) — primarily the advanced search functions for births by name/year to check name spellings, to try to follow marriage name transitions and check for deaths. Also to find wives/children in the same household, given that younger folks are more likely to have presence on Facebook. Somewhat hobbled by data gaps (eg: marriages only between 1984–2004).
• Free Births, Marriages, Deaths (www.freebmd.org and local county versions like that for Berkshire); even more hobbled by available date ranges
• Various data sources deduced from UK companies house, to report associations between company directors (with their names and age on board) and the companies they manage; then to enact contact on LinkedIn or using email addresses on the company’s own web pages.
• Not forgetting generic Google searches

After some ten weeks of effort, current progress is:

1. Deaths: 7
2. Invited so far: 94
3. Definitely 100% found, but so far unable to issue invite: 44
4. Yet to Locate: 28

The one thing the numbers don’t tell anyone is the number of pupils who’ve already reconnected with friends they lost 40 years ago, and the uplifting discovery that everyone is chatting away on the reunion page as if the long time apart hadn’t occurred at all. Most in the UK or Ireland. Some in France and Spain. Some in Australia, some in the USA. Further that two people to date have created accounts on Facebook, and a further two re-awakened dormant accounts, to participate in the regrouped photos, memories and updates based community.

There are a small subset with no social network account, use that of a spouse, use an account solely on LinkedIn, or just sit behind an email address. However, we can engage 86%+ via Facebook if the company would allow us to finish the job.

The Two Impediments

There are two things that Facebook do that undermines us completing our assignment — to engage, and then invite, all our fellow pupils with who we shared 7 years of our early lives:

1. Discovery. All of us are within 1 year’s age of each other, and we know the approximate geographic area where friends lived back in 1969–76. We have often used outside resources to work out female married names. The one thing we can’t do is to search Facebook by name and age, nor to bound this in an individual county or country; only to get names in specific village or town names, or pollute the results with everyone of that name worldwide. For the purposes of finding long lost school friends, the find friend search facility on Facebook is almost useless.
2. You’ve found the Facebook name of an old friend, now lets get them invited to the event. Eh, not so fast. They need to be in your friend network to invite them; knowing their precise Facebook URL is of no help. So, you send them a message on Facebook to mention the event, and to request they friend you even temporarily so you can issue an invite. Except 78% of the time, the message sent is never read, and the random friend request ignored — given, no doubt, that they recall the person, but have no idea of what’s behind the request.

As an example of finding one female colleague from way back when. I traced her parents, father died, mother remarried twice, appeared to move to Guildford before evaporating. Traced back to birth certificates, no sign of her in the UK, followed what I thought was her sister to Cornwall, then all her kids (but no way to know if it was her – a guess around many other folks of the same name that married various surnames). No trace back up the line through all the Facebook connections I followed. Did a Google search and found mention of her brother with a fairly unique middle name (birth records only cite an initial). Did a search of company directors, found 15 companies he’d been involved in. Searched the web sites of the ones where his directorship was current, found him on a contact us page with his picture. Found a match on LinkedIn, sent him an InMail (extra cost service to send a limited number of unsolicited emails to a contact whose not in your own contact network). He replied back within 24 hours, giving me her location and email address.

The disappointment was when I tapped her email address into Facebook, there she was citing one of many local villages as her home ‘town’. If Facebook let you search for her surname, county Berkshire, age 57–58, I’d have found her in 30 seconds. Rinse and repeat for the 172 we’re trying to find.

Then to get folks invited, we hit the next challenge. At the moment, we have to resort to all sorts of shenanigans to recall the persons old personal friends, and ask them to effect friend requests bit by bit to try to bring them in. It’s a painfully slow and largely fruitless endeavour, short of finding postal addresses and sending a full list of everyone found to date. As soon as they can see the extent of the work with their friends on board, engagement really slips into gear.

It would help us enhance Facebooks user engagement — both in user volume and access frequency — if only we could finish finding folks, then get the event invite, and access to the event page, to them all. Facebook could easily rinse and repeat that capability for every old UK school year in the land, if only those two shortcomings could and would be fixed.

The question is — will Facebook allow us, and all like school alumnis that follow the same path — to do so productively? Or to walk away from a golden opportunity that’s otherwise right in front of them…