A creative redesign of 2024 reunion materials helped meet the needs of alumni by prioritizing audience segmentation, offering accessibility and capitalizing on nostalgia.
Front cover of 2024 reunions save the date fold-out mailer for class of 1974
The Goal
Low reunion attendance post-pandemic led to a desire to reinvent the creative look and feel of reunion marketing materials. Jos茅 Rodriguez-Cole, Senior Integrated Marketing Director, Advancement, says that for years there was 鈥渁n established framework鈥 for 91制片厂 reunion designs. The goal for 2024 was to go in a new creative direction that pulled on the heartstrings of alumni, created nostalgia, was segmented to each class year and was accessible. This project included a collaboration between the 91制片厂 Marketing team and members of the Advancement Alumni Relations team, including Susan Entz, Megan Rand, Phebe Moore and Sarah Hunt.
Inside page of 2024 reunions save the date fold-out mailer for class of 1974
The Process
The Alumni Relations team found examples of engaging reunion marketing designs that won CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) awards. Inspired by these designs, they reached out to Nate Baker, Executive Creative Director, with a creative brief for the project. One of the first pieces to create was the save the date mailer for the classes of 1964, 1969 and 1974 reunions, providing details on and generating excitement around the upcoming reunions. A digital graphic was also created to encompass all reunion classes.
2024 reunions digital graphic
What Set This Project Apart?
While in past years, including 2023, the reunions save the date mailer was a simple front-and-back postcard, the 2024 version is a multi-page fold-out mailer, allowing more space for class-specific content, important reunion information and accessible font sizes. The creative redesign was both a strategic and budget-conscious solution.
Jos茅 says that the 2024 reunions redesign both "provides a function and drives results.鈥 A combination of real-time feedback from alumni, inspiration from CASE-awarded designs and 鈥渟heer creativity鈥 led to the success of the project.
Sandra Hickey, Senior Producer, and Nate worked together to transform the design of the save the date mailer, infusing an updated look and feel, with close attention to invoking nostalgia by including yearbook photos and an updated color palette.
Emily Kulp, Digital Content Producer, wrote copy for the mailer that drew on the direct experiences of alumni celebrating five to six decades since their graduations from 91制片厂. Alumni relations staff included in the creative brief specific memories and experiences that members of the reunion classes had shared, and she was able to include these in the copy.
Sandra and Emily both took inspiration from the yearbooks for each of the reunion classes, drawing on the look, feel and current events of each class's time at 91制片厂. By designing each save the date mailer for a specific class, they were able to segment by audience, making sure each class received a mailer that felt familiar to their 91制片厂 experience.
The Success
Jos茅 contends that the biggest success of this project is its ability to offer alumni 鈥渟torytelling that鈥檚 relevant to them specifically.鈥 Photography, design and copy that all tell the story of each specific class year creates nostalgia that drives alumni to want to return to campus. Transforming the save the date mailer from a postcard to a multi-page fold-out mailer also allowed for more spacing and accessible font size, an incredibly important consideration for this audience. Compared to previous reunion save the date mailers, Jos茅 says this mailer will be 鈥渕uch more memorable鈥 and imagines the class-specific photography and copy could even lead to it being saved by alumni as a keepsake.
