Ideas for Remote Reunions

As you prepare to move events online, it is important to think through what you wish to get across and how you can maintain the community feel and energy through a virtual space. Below are a few ideas for remote events:

This document partners with “How to lead a brainstorm and strategy session for a remote event”

Host a school and constituent wide evening event. Have the head of school address the community. Topic ideas include

• COVID’s impact on the school and actions the school is taking
• Shout out to all family and community members still working on the front line.
• Celebrate your community and the continued engagement and importance of alumni. Highlight some alumni stories
• Have select faculty share how they are approaching remote learning

OPTIONAL: Do you have any professional performers as alumni? Request a live living room performance of a song or two

We understand that everyone has a tight budget, this is just an idea and must be considered for feasibility within your school:

To promote community from afar, offer restaurant gift cards to event attendees to support their local restaurants by sending them to GrubHub to order dinner for the night of the event. This way, everyone will be eating, participating and supporting their local communities.

Schedule class specific Zoom sessions. Consider a few things:

• If a large number of people are expected to attend, is there an agenda? How are people to connect if only one person at a time can speak without people speaking over each other?
• Do you have class officers moderate the conversation?

Offer panels and virtual tours of new things happening at the school.

• Are there new initiatives that you planned to showcase for the in-person reunion?
• Do you have photos and expert staff that can share these initiatives to interested individuals?

Design a competition: There are several games that are easy to lead from afar.

• Make a friendly competition between class years or ask friend groups to make their own teams to participate
• Run Jeopardy or Trivia from afar
• Incentivize by offering the winners gift cards to a local restaurant of their choice to support their local community at this time

Host a challenge on social media. Using common household items, have people create a sculpture or art piece that best represents the year/decade that they graduated from their alma mater

• Have well known school faculty be the judges for creativity and accuracy.
• Have a public vote for fan favorite

These are just a few ways to be creative as you look to engage with your community.