In addition to the games you will be playing at the family reunion, now is the perfect time to make planning for next year a bit easier and to make sure everyone is able to stay in touch after they go home.
In order to do this, prepare a short form ahead of time and pass it out to all of your family members. This form should be kept simple but will be used to collect each family member’s contact information. Be sure to ask for the phone number, including area code, as well as their address. Don’t forget to also ask about email addresses and websites, as many people are creating their own sites and that can be a great way for the family to keep in touch.
At the family reunion, you can assign someone the duty of passing these forms out or you can take care of it yourself. If you are having the reunion in a ballroom or some other place with just one or two doorways, you can easily make sure everyone gets one of these forms by having someone man the door or have them sitting on a table as your guests arrive. If you are having it outdoors, however, catching everyone can be tricky – you never knew your great, great aunt Matilda could move so fast, did you?
Make sure you hand the forms out as soon as your guests arrive and encourage them to complete them right away. Otherwise, they will get stuck in their pockets and they will completely forget about them. Also, keep plenty of pencils and pens on hand – you don’t want to give anyone an excuse to not fill this puppy out!
Before your guests leave at the end of your get together, double check to make sure they have turned in the form. Don’t let any of them sneak off without getting this thing to you!
After the family reunion, type up all of the information on these forms and send it out to each of your family members. If they provided you with an email address, that would be the easiest and cheapest way to send out the updated list – all you will need to do is send it as an attachment. If you have a secured family website, you can also post the information to the site. For those non-techie family members, however, you will need to stick with the traditional snail mail technique.