It works well and gives us more of a personal tie. On the other end of the date range, current graduates are starting to appear with some entries including a Web site URL as well as the e-mail address. They say they feel like they never left and often send us the e-mail addresses of others. The First Friday letters let us touch all our alumni as quickly as pressing a button. Though most colleges focus on alumni, their approaches are easily adapted for k-12 schools.
Databases can include parents, current students, and friends of the school, as well as alumni.
To start building your school's e-mail database, begin by making a plan. Look at several working models of e-mail databases online to get ideas about presentation and content. Define the content and segments. Work with your school computer expert to decide on format. It is much easier to settle on details in the planning phase than to redo the database later, so make sure you can retrieve subsets of the database like alumni, parents or friends for special focus communications.