Class Officer Minutes
November 10, 2002

Participants: Erin Ennis, Julie Temlak, Lynda Vescio, Alicehandra Fritz, Amy Porter, Kate Gombos, Lori Hendricks, Jennifer West

• Job descriptions (along with the meeting agenda) were distributed before the call so that everyone would have an opportunity to review. Erin provided an explanation of why each officer was asked to provide a job description of their new duties: we created a new position at Reunion, Melanie Carino as head of class fundraising activities. As a consequence, it made sense to have everyone give us a sense of what they thought they should be doing, to eliminate overlap of duties.

• Class financial situation: Jen Warner was not able to participate in the call, so we will distribute later a review of expected expenses in the lead up to reunion, as well as a statement of the class’ current financial state. NOTE: Kate and Erin are exploring means for classmates to be able to pay class dues with credit cards via the website (in conjunction with the effort to establish a means to buy class fundraisers on-line discussed below).

• Outreach projects: Julie gave a brief explanation of our major project for the next five years, a plan to reach out to every member of the graduating class of 1992. Our “Six Degrees of Separation” project ­ code-named 6DS ­ will tap into the existing contacts of the current slate of class officers to reach as many people as we can. We will pass information on possible candidates for the next group of class officers (to take office at the 2007 reunion) back to the Nominating Committee, as well as pass any news back to the scribes. Alicechandra and Amy will ask the class agents to do the same.
  • We had a brief discussion of how to better circulate information. Email seems to be the best, which webmaster Kate has done a great job in gearing up. Some interest expressed in posting a list of all known email addresses. Kate will post a list of names of everyone whose email address that we know, but not list the actual email addresses to protect privacy.

  • Julie asked everyone to come up with people who we should reach out to immediately and email the suggestions to her.

• Newsletter to class: Outgoing class president Julia Cronin had suggested to Erin at reunion that the next hard copy of the class newsletter contain content from the outgoing officers as well as the incoming officers. Lynda will compile everyone’s submissions. Based on the timelines provided by the Alumnae Association, we will target March 2003 for this newsletter to be mailed.

• Head Class Agent update: Amy and Alicechandra gave us an overview of their goals for the Alumnae Fund for this year: $28,000, and a total participation rate of 35% -- 42.5% of the class contributed during the 2002 reunion year; reunion years normally have a higher participation rate than non-reunion years. For the next five years, Amy and Alicechandra are focusing on increasing participation by encouraging more smaller gifts and increasing the number of large gifts ($500 and over).

  They are also working with Hilary Bland on an “Advance Gift Fund” for the 25th reunion, which would take additional separate contributions from class members to help augment our gift at the 25th reunion in 2017. This effort will likely wait a bit since many classmates stretched their normal giving for reunion. Brief discussion of who manages the contributions to the Advance fund ­ it is handled by the College and has had a respectable return in past years.

• Website: Kate gave us an overview of the class email list, as well as a request for all the officers to provide her with additional content for the website, such as information on the Advance Gift Fund. At Lori’s suggestion, we will circulate a list of dates for quarterly E-Blasts based on the deadlines that the class scribes have for the Alumnae Quarterly. Officers will provide additional content for these messages so that we can better utilize this means of connecting with classmates.

  NOTE: Deadlines for the next for eblasts are as follows:

  • January 15, 2003 (for Spring AQ)
  • May 1, 2003 (for Summer AQ)
  • August 1 (for Fall AQ)
  • November 1 (for Winter AQ)

• Class fundraising activities: We inherited the remainder of the MHC beach towels and have had a couple of hits from our ad that ran in the Alumnae Quarterly. Erin and Julie met with the MHC Campus Store manager when they were on campus the weekend of November 16. While the Store won’t sell the towels themselves due to complications with sales taxes (they are for profit, we are not), they are willing to display one of the towels along with ordering information. Kate and Erin are working on establishing an on-line payment system so that interested buyers could purchase the towels via the class website.

• Other ways to connect with classmates: Jennifer West suggested that we target nationwide service activities that classmates across the country can participate in as a group, such as the Race for the Cure. She will do some further investigation to see what activities are coming up and circulate to the other officers.

• Timing of board calls: We will have board calls approximately every six months. Sunday afternoons (East coast time) appear to work for the majority of the board. That makes the general timing our our next call approximately June, 2003.