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On November 13, I will have been an initiated member of my fraternity for 20 years. Damn, I'm old. But, I hadn't received any sort of invitation from my Pi Kappa Phi chapter at Indiana University for any sort of gathering to acknowledge the event. Homecoming came and went, and I was feeling a little disappointed that they totally missed the chance to celebrate a cool anniversary.
Well, today, an invitation arrived in the mail for a celebration on the weekend of November 17. I took back every nasty thought that had entered my brain. Those little bastards did care, after all, bless them! I hadn't thought that they'd do an event closer to the actual anniversary... I just assumed that they would do something at Homecoming. At Indiana, that's when all the alumni events are held.
ANYWAY, the point of this post is that I got this invitation with 17 days notice. Frankly, when you want alumni to attend something, particularly something that's not already on their radar screen, you need to give a hell of a lot more notice than 17 days. I know that in the student world, two weeks is an eternity. Seventeen days is like an entire pay period or one really hot and heavy quickie college romance.
Frankly, I would have liked to have known about this event in early September. Two months would have still been a challenge for me, given family events, work, conferences, and more.
How early should you invite alumni to an event? I say 60 days, minimum, unless you only want the usual suspects who can drive to your campus in an hour or less to attend. If you expect people to buy airline tickets and plan time away from business and family, you have to plan far in advance. If you can give more notice, give more. The ideal thing is to get the word out via email blasts several months in advance, then send out your printed invites 45-60 days ahead of time.
Fortunately, the things I had on my calendar that weekend were not terribly important. I really want to see my brothers from 20 years ago, so I freed myself up. I snatched one of the last seats on a Frontier Airlines flight to Indianapolis for under $400. Hotel was a nightmare. I can't get a hotel within 20 miles of Bloomington, Indiana. I finally found a place about a half hour's drive away. If I had been given more notice, I could have landed a nice room minutes from campus.
Now, I can't drink because I have to get in a damn rental car and drive a half hour back to my hotel room. Damn it!
So, dear student planner, give your alumni some notice. We plan our life events much further in advance than students do – it prolongs our death, you see. I know it's annoying and it doesn't sync well with the spontaneity of the college student lifestyle, but if you want us "old folks" to come around, support you, and pass along all that cool tradition stuff, you have to play the game our way from time to time.
