As the president of my high school class (graduated in 1998), I felt obliged to get involved with planning our 10-year high school reunion. I found myself really wishing for a service to help me do this online… I’m not sure how credible this is as a long term business, but there is definitely a lot of PAIN here that is not being well addressed. Here are some excerpts from an executive summary I put together:
Business Overview
Reoonyun.com is a web service for planning a reunion. According to Reunion Research, every year there are approximately 150,000 class reunions, of which the average attendance is 180, contributing to 27 million people attending a class reunion every year. Reunions are a unique type of event to plan for two primary reasons:
- The event planner does not have the contact information of everybody in the group. They may not even remember everyone’s name.
- It is highly desirable to select a date and location that accommodate maximum attendance
The internet lacks a quality tool to plan this unique event. Reoonyun is the solution to this problem.
Marketing Strategy
Due to enthusiasm to reconnect with old acquaintances and the average US high school class size being 768 people, Reoonyun will be able to scale virally faster than most other social networks. With just the founder’s personal network, Reoonyun will be able to register 100 classes of 500 people for a total of 50,000 registered users. Reoonyun will also launch an online marketing campaign consisting of:
- Full time search engine optimization and Google Adwords campaign
- Facebook application and Myspace widgets integrating with reoonyun.com
- Large amount of blogging and searchable content by founders with promotion to Techcrunch and other technology review companies
Product
Reoonyun will be the ‘one-stop-shop’ for a reunion planner providing all of the key web capabilities necessary for planning a successful event. One can easily imagine what these basic event planning features entail and to stay concise they are not all listed. However, Reoonyun will incorporate four additional features specifically designed for planning reunions: Viral Contact Gathering, Collaborative Event Planning, Reunion Planning Wiki, and Online Donation/Collection.
Viral Contact Gathering
The viral contact gathering feature will make collecting contact information effortless for the reunion organizer. This feature will work in the following fashion:
- Organizer performs initial setup of the reunion details and enters in the names of the invitees she can think of. Reoonyun searches through the users contact book and suggests contact information for each user including email and mobile phone.
- Organizer sends a message to the invitees via email and sms. The message encourages users to visit reoonyun.com and confirm their info.
- As the invitee signs on to the site they are prompted to import their contact book to continue virally marketing the reunion to the rest of the class.
*Note – this viral marketing feature is a key and unique feature of Reoonyun that will allow it to scale faster than typical social networks. For every reunion planner Reoonyun acquires, an average of 500 new users will be registered to the site. Due to the social aspect of reunions, invitees being contacted by old friends will feel obligated to signup.
Collaborative Event Planning
Reoonyun features a voting and polling area where users can vote on details such as date, location and type of entertainment. This will ensure maximum attendance by the group and take pressure off the event planner to make independent decisions that the group will agree with.
Reunion Planning Wiki
As hundreds of reunions are planned on Reoonyun.com in cities around the world, a wealth of user generated reunion planning advice will be collected in the wiki to further assist future users.
Online Donation/Collection
Typically members of a class or group will contribute money to pay for the events upfront costs. Reoonyun will provide an integrated feature to allow attendees to transfer money to the organizer.
Sales Strategy
Reoonyun could achieve revenue from the following sources:
- Affiliate payment programs with travel companies offering incentives for coordinated flight, car rentals and hotel accommodations.
- Lead generation payment from photographers, venues, and entertainment.
- Lead generation from people locator professionals and services such as ussearch.com
- Small transaction fees for transferring money to organizer via Reoonyun.
- Premium features – such as subscription to maintenance of contacts records for future years or the ability to export all your classes contact information to your address book.
Competition
Existing reunion planning forums such as classmates.com, reunion.com, and myevent.com market themselves as online reunion planning sites, but are old and out-dated. They lack integration with dominant social networks and intuitive user interfaces, and they require subscription fees early on, dissuading most reunion planners from signing up.
Existing event planning websites such as Evite and Mypunchbowl lack the collaboration tools to engage the entire group in planning the event and have no mechanism to find old contacts virally.
Social networks such as Facebook and Myspace lack flexible event planning tools and, although user adoption is high in younger generations, the perceived stigma of these sites continues to prevent older generation users from joining, making them ill-suited for planning a reunion.
Professional reunion planners offer perhaps the most convenient way to plan a reunion, however these professionals come at an expense that most classes or groups cannot manage to afford.
Financial Plan
Reoonyun desires to raise $250,000 in angel funding. With this funding, Reoonyun will be able to develop its site, secure relationships with affiliate partners, and conduct an aggressive Google Adwords campaign towards anyone planning a reunion. Reoonyun will achieve breakeven within 6 months.
If you think this project sounds interesting, please let me know.
Tagged: Event Planning, Reoonyun, Reunion