WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL REUNION EVENT IS DELAYED A YEAR DUE TO COVID? INVITE A PLUS ONE, OF COURSE!

Throwing a High School Reunion is difficult under the best circumstances, but what happens when a pandemic hits right before your event?

What could have been a disaster for our class, turned into a success, when we invited our plus one.

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Our Class of 1980 Ward Melville 40th High School Reunion was initially planned for July 2020 in New York. Then Covid-19 hit, and everything was put on hold with an uncertain outcome. Would the venue go out of business holding our deposits? Could we safely have an event due to Covid-19? Would we sell enough tickets to meet our obligations? All ticket sales came to a screeching halt from March 2020 to May 2021 while people waited to see if we would or even could go forward. After deciding to go forward with it, following the lifting of some restrictions in NYS in the Spring of 2021, we reached out to the Class of 1981 who's 40th was not even planned due to Covid, and invited our PLUS ONE! to join the party, making our numbers.

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Our success is due in part to how the committee worked together.

There are several factors that made this endeavor brag worthy: project management, target marketing, fund raising, team building, social media planning and monitoring, email campaigns with share functions and a web site with a sign up forms to populate the emailing list, and to pay online, we even printed individual class buttons for the attendees using our old class pictures.

The Three Village Times did an article on our reunion planning.