After the family reunion ends, how do you continue to cultivate family relationships in a meaningful way?
Busy schedules, long-distance travel, and back-to-school activities can quickly become the priority once summer ends. Staying in touch with family turns into phone calls, texts, and seeing social media posts.
Reunacy offers more ways to stay connected with your family members and loved ones in between family reunions. We give you one digital place for your loved ones to convene and talk on a daily basis, store photos, work on family history projects, and plan the in-between events without starting from scratch.
Here are 25 different things you can do in Reunacy in-between reunions:
Family Events and Get Togethers
Birthday Parties
This is a great way to make sure every family member feels loved and cherished! Create an event for the next birthday party coming up, and the locals can RSVP. Whether you’re going to a restaurant or throwing a party at home, the RSVP feature will help you prep how much food to account for.
Holiday Gatherings
Create events for the holiday family gatherings early. This will help everyone with travel schedules and timing, especially if some families have to visit more than one home on Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Football Game Days
We’re all excited for football season to start up again! Why not make it a way to reconnect with family members? Plan game day events, share your fantasy football predictions and fun appetizer recipes on the Reunacy Message Board.
Milestone Family Events – Making Your Family Get Togethers a Routine
Baby showers, bridal showers, retirement parties, big anniversaries, new homes, and engagement parties – these are just a few of the special moments that are worth celebrating and planning in Reunacy. The routines you create by planning consistent family gatherings have lasting benefits for everyone in the family.
According to the American Psychological Association, making time for family routines and rituals consistently creates stronger family relationships, increases children’s health and adolescent’s sense of personal identity, and helps families during times of stress and transition,
Create these events so relatives can plan travel with enough notice, and upload photos afterward so the family members who couldn’t make it still get to see everything.
Graduations
Graduation season is a busy time for traveling, and graduation tickets and hotel availability can be limited. Create the event early so the family can RSVP, coordinate who’s using which tickets, and plan the celebration afterward.
Everyone can share the graduation photos in one place instead of scattered across text threads.
Barbeques
Nothing brings family together faster than food and a backyard. Create an event for your next cookout and use the RSVP feature to see who’s coming, then let everyone claim a dish on the Message Board so you don’t end up with five potato salads.
Photos and Memories
Create Digital Photo Albums, Privately
One of the most annoying tasks after a family reunion is collecting all the photos and storing them in one place for the family to see. The task is to collect the dozens of photos on everyone’s phones and the professional photography all in one accessible place.
Creating event family photo albums in Reunacy solves this problem. Your entire family already has access to Reunacy, so all you have to do is remind everyone to upload the photos to your group. It’s easy, and keeps the memories alive after the party is over!
Share Daily Photo Updates
We live in a very visual world, yet many people desire more privacy on social media. Sending photos in the family text message chain can clog your data.
Reunacy Exclusive gives your family a place to share photos often, and privately.
It’s the little moments that build more closeness with family – like sharing photos from a fun concert you went to or the incredible eggplant parmesan you made.
Scan and Preserve Old Family Photos
Family history buffs, experts, and beginners love using Reunacy for family history work.
You know that shoebox at Uncle Andy’s house of old family photos? Upload those photos to your Reunacy group in one afternoon. You don’t need special equipment to do this; your phone camera is fine. Once the photos are in Reunacy, the whole family has them!
Kids’ Milestones Between Reunions
Create albums around special moments for grandparents, aunts and uncles to enjoy. Moments like the baby’s first time at the beach or zoo, or your toddler’s first day at pre-school.
Start Next Year’s Reunion Slideshow
Every family reunion slideshow starts the same way: someone texting the whole family one week out, looking for photos.
If your family is uploading photos to Reunacy all year, the slideshow builds itself. By the time the next reunion rolls around, you already have a year of birthdays, graduations, game days, and random Tuesday moments ready to go!
Staying In Touch
Member Directory
Now that you’ve done all the hard work of inviting your entire family to Reunacy and encouraging everyone to set up their profiles, you want to keep that information active and current as you prepare for next year’s reunion.
If someone moves, changes their email address or phone number, or has a baby, all those updates can be tracked in Reunacy.
And if you’re just getting your group set up, our new Bulk Import feature lets you upload your whole contact list from a CSV file at once, instead of adding everyone one by one.
Welcoming New Members
It’s a blessing when your family grows, whether it’s with a new marriage, a new baby, or uniting as a blended family. These moments are essential as you’ll want to welcome the new family members into your Reunacy group. They’ll have access to the directory so they can become familiar with all the names and faces in the family. They can write notes on the message board, and RSVP to events. It’s a great way to welcome new family members quickly, and help ease some of the social anxiety!
Daily Chats with your Family – The Message Board
The Message Board is great for keeping family conversations in one place. Great Grandma Lily might not really be a texter, but the Reunacy Message Board is an easy way to keep her, and everyone, included in family messages and chats.
Post an update, ask a question, or share good news! Everyone can respond when they get a chance instead of scrambling to keep up with 60 unread texts.
The Message Board is especially helpful for the family members who aren’t on social media, and makes your family communications more intentional.
Send a Group Message
The Group Message is a great feature for getting everyone on the same page VERY quickly. It’s exactly what it sounds like: send a message that goes to everyone in your group.
This is great for messages where you need to update everyone quickly. Things like family updates, reminders, questions, or a reminder to RSVP.
Start a Standing Monthly Video Call
Create a monthly event in Reunacy that gets everyone on a phone call or a family Zoom session. Some families do this every Sunday! Honestly, it’s an amazing way to stay in touch and support each other.
You can drop the Zoom or Google meet link into the event, and anyone who wants to go can pop right in. We recommend keeping it consistent, for example, making the family call the first Sunday of each month.
Planning the Next Reunion
The best time to start planning the next family reunion is EARLY, and while everyone still remembers the fun they had at the last reunion. Post a Save-the-Date event in your Reunacy group so everyone can start planning for next year! Even if it says “June 23, somewhere in Georgia,” that gives everyone something to look forward to.
You can also use the group to figure out those details – like polling the family on dates, reunion venues and destinations, and start collecting RSVPs very early.
Poll the group now to find your family reunion committee members too! That will save you a few headaches and make the planning process more collaborative.
Collecting Money For Your Next Reunion
Venue deposits and family reunion t-shirt orders are just a few things you’ll need some cash for before the reunion weekend. In addition, you can collect funds for catering, park permits, rental equipment, the scholarship fund, or reunion souvenirs.
In your event, you can add a link to collect payment for tickets. The most common option is to use PayPal, but you’re welcome to include a link to any payment platform you choose.
Beyond the Family
Did you know that Reunacy is used for all kinds of planning and gatherings beyond family reunions?
Check out some of the other ways to use Reunacy!
- Class Reunions – Class reunion planners and alumni associations love using Reunacy, especially for the way we host individual alumni profiles, collect event payments, and coordinate the event logistics. Create a group as you plan your next class reunion!
- Church Groups – Church directories are essential for a congregation. With our events features, your church group will be getting together more often!
- Book Clubs – Book clubs use Reunacy to schedule meetings and track RSVPs so hosts know how many chairs and snacks to prepare for. With the Message Board and Messaging features, the reading list, discussion notes, and next book picks are easy to communicate and share.
- Sports Teams – Teams and leagues use Reunacy for game and practice scheduling with RSVPs so coaches know who’s showing up, and to share photos and season highlights in one private place parents can actually find.
- Professional Networking – Industry and conference groups use Reunacy to keep contact info current, communicate and send messages, and organize meetups outside of Slack or LinkedIn.