Class Secretary Handbook
Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t s
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The Purpose and Importance of Class Notes .....................................................................2
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Your Responsibilities ........................................................................................................2
— Collect News and Prepare Columns
— Write “In Memory” Remembrances
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Guidelines .........................................................................................................................3
— Subject Matter
— Confirmation of News
— Reunion Years
— Definition of a “Mention”
— Proofing
— Photographs
— Guest Secretaries
—Word Count Guidelines
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How to Gather News........................................................................................................7
— By Telephone
— Address Changes
— News Clippings
— E-mail
— Class Letters
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In Memory Remembrances ...............................................................................................9
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Formatting........................................................................................................................10
— Classmate vs. Non-Classmate News
— Married Names
— Secretary’s Name and Address
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Deadlines and Publication .................................................................................................11
— Where and When the Notes Appear
— Publication Dates vs. Submission Deadlines
— Getting the Notes to Amherst
The Purpose and Importance of Class Notes
You have volunteered for the important task of keeping the college and your fellow alumni up to
date on the lives of your classmates. The notes allow alumni classes to retain a feeling of unity in the
years following graduation from Amherst; as a result, the notes help contribute to high attendance
at reunions, strong Annual Fund participation, and general support for class and college programs.
We rely on well written and in-depth class notes to foster and sustain the relationship between
Amherst and her alumni.
We look to the notes to accomplish the following: to help individual classmates connect with one
another; to make every member of the class feel included; and to promote goodwill toward
Amherst. Doing this in the limited space available and with an eye toward a broad reading audience
necessitates certain guidelines. We have set limits on content and use of space, while trying not to
limit the number of classmates mentioned or the personal touches only a class secretary can provide.
Your contribution is indispensable, and we are extremely grateful for your willingness to assist in
this way. The job of class secretary is a highly visible and important one to the class and the college,
and you should not hesitate to call if you encounter a situation that requires clarification. Thank you
for your efforts, your phone calls, and most importantly, your time spent writing the notes.
Yo u r Re s p o n s i b i l i t i e s
1. Regularly collect news and prepare columns four times per year
The job of class secretary requires that you take a proactive, investigative approach to collecting
news about your classmates. Personal news of every classmate should appear at least once
between reunions (every five years). Your column should appear in every issue of the magazine.
2. Write “In Memory” Remembrances
As secretary, you are responsible for writing timely “In Memory” remembrances for deceased
classmates or for finding the appropriate person to prepare the remembrance (see page 9 for
details).
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Guidelines
Subject Matter
Notes should be limited to news of other classmates or other alumni associated with your class.
Secretaries should not include their own (or other’s) editorials, essays, poems or personal opinions.
Address changes, including e-mail addresses, and telephone numbers for classmates should not be
included. (You can say that new contact info is available from the Alumni Office or via “Find
alumni” at https://cms.amherst.edu/alumni.)
News from classmates should be of reasonable length and of an informative nature and should
appeal to the entire class. Please watch for and avoid innuendos, slurs, inside jokes or personal
messages. Please do not cut and paste entire letters, articles or news releases as they will not be
reprinted—please digest or summarize them. The class notes section of your class web page,
however, is available for longer documents that won’t fit in the notes column in the magazine and is
also available for posting photos. Please talk to your contact person at the College if your class
doesn’t yet have a web page and is interested in setting one up.
Keep in mind that your column will be read by a broad audience—classmates, parents, grandparents,
siblings, Williams alumni, perhaps even patients in an Amherst doctor’s waiting room—and so
address it accordingly.
We encourage you, of course, to make your column enjoyable. Your classmates will appreciate a
secretary who knows the “personality” of the class. But do not be ashamed of class notes that sound
like class notes. News is your primary goal. Your classmates want to hear about each other, first
and foremost.
Confirmation of News
Occasionally, a secretary will hear from a classmate who is upset about news he or she did not want
published or information that was reported inaccurately. The one sure way to avoid this situation is
to confirm questionable or personal news with your classmates. This will make the news more
engaging—you can find out, for example, exactly why he/she moved to Boston! Take a moment to
think about your sources and the classmate being mentioned. When in doubt, reconfirm. Please
remember that some of your classmates work in sensitive fields in which information about their
whereabouts/doings should not be publicized. If you run across such a mention, please contact that
person to determine whether or not they would like to appear in the magazine.
Reunion Years
As class secretary, you should be sure that your efforts dovetail with those of your reunion chair and
other class officers. You should publish the dates of reunion in the issues leading up to the grand
event and continue your efforts to mention all classmates prior to reunion. All classes are
encouraged to spread the word about reunion through a telephone tree or e-mail blast, and you may
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pick up news items through this effort. Please keep in mind that all news about an upcoming
reunion should be in your notes by the December 1 and March 1 deadlines.
The Definition of “Mention”
A “mention” in the class notes is the news of any classmate, whether mentioned in a detailed
paragraph of information or as a brief update. Any news is good news, as long as there is news. A
name in a list (such as attendees at a wedding or dinner) without any news attached will not count
as a mention. In addition, classmates mentioned as reunion attendees (this can often be half the
class!) and classmates mentioned with clearly no news intent (e.g., “We haven’t heard from John
Jones lately. Does anyone know where he is?”) will not count as mentions in terms of the word
count per mention or as a mention for that person.
Our intent and hope is that your column will include detailed, personal news of each classmate,
informing others of job changes, geographic location, marriages, births, new educational plans or
other specific events in someone’s life. If you have only reported a sentence on a classmate in one
column, try to include more substantive information in a future issue.
You should be aware not only of those classmates who remain unmentioned, but also of those who
send news frequently, such as “Finished first semester law school,” “Finished second semester law
school,” etc. We leave it to each secretary to decide when and how often a classmate’s news should
be printed. The percentage of classmates mentioned should increase as you approach reunion.
Word Counts
When we decided to reunite the notes in Fall 2003, we needed to make a few adjustments to the
previous guidelines, one that would result in a reduction in the total number of notes pages. At the
same time, the primary objective of the notes—to provide news of as many alumni as possible in an
informative and enjoyable fashion—still held.
In that spirit, we came up with what we believe to be easy and workable length guidelines for
secretaries to follow. Our concern in determining this was fairness so that classes are not penalized
for having fewer members or for having more.
Each secretary will have a base of 250 words per column for intro, conclusion and/or between
mention commentary. In addition, you will have an average of 70 words for each individual
classmate you mention. A mention, however, must include both a name and at least one bit of
news. A list of 12 wedding attendees, for example, will not count as 12 individual mentions, unless
there is news about each person.
We feel that using a guideline of words per mention will give you the flexibility you need. For
example, you are certainly free to include longer reports about some classmates, but they should be
balanced out with some shorter mentions. While we certainly don’t expect you to count out each
word for each classmate, we would expect the word count in the entire column to average out and
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fit within the overall guidelines. (For those of you who work on a computer, calculating your words
per mention should not be a problem, as word counts are easily available through the “Tools” menu
in MS Word or WordPerfect, and classmate mentions are bolded and stand out easily.) One easy
way to cut down on space is to report or digest news rather than quoting it directly. We encourage
primarily summarized news, into which the occasional quote can be inserted. We are including
overall word counts for columns, depending on the number of classmates mentioned. Please know
that if your notes do not fit within the guidelines, your class contact will ask you to edit them until
they do.
Proofing
The notes are proofread by a professional proofreader. We try to avoid substantial changes to your
text but will edit for consistency and accuracy.
Photographs
In an effort to control the costs of printing Amherst, the magazine maintains its policy of not
including photographs in the class notes section of the magazine. We receive numerous
photographs documenting the lives and accomplishments of our alumni—selecting and publishing
from that group would be difficult and costly. Instead, we encourage alumni to post photographs
on the class news section of the class web page.
Guest Secretaries
The notes section is usually the first in the magazine to be read. Your class must be represented in
every issue. In the rare instance that you may not be able to prepare notes for an upcoming issue,
you should designate a classmate to cover for you. Please notify our office in advance.
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AMHERST COLLEGE
Class Secretary Word Count Guidelines
No. of Classmates Mentioned
Total Words Per Column
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
55
60
65
70
75
80
85
90
95
100
600
950
1,300
1,650
2,000
2,350
2,700
3,050
3,400
3,750
4,100
4,450
4,800
5,150
5,500
5,850
6,200
6,550
6,900
7,250
Please note that the overall word count guidelines include 70 words per classmate mention plus 250
words to use as you see fit.
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H O W T O G AT H E R N E W S
By Telephone
Phone calls are a very effective way to gather news that is personal, interesting and
up to date. Each year this office will provide you with an updated contact list for your classmates.
Feel free to call our office anytime if you need individual updates or check contact information
online at https://cms.amherst.edu/alumni. There are several ways to pay for your Amherst
telephone calls:
1. Expend your own funds and absorb these expenses personally.
2. Submit documentation of your expenses and request the College to issue a certification of
expenses incurred for tax purposes.
3. Keep a record of your calls and request reimbursement.
Address Changes
We depend on your notification to keep our database current. You will discover many new
addresses in your work as class secretary, and it is enormously helpful if you will report these
changes to our office. Please fax, e-mail or call us with these updates. The college, fellow class
officers and future class secretaries will benefit from your assistance!
News Clippings
The Alumni Office employs a newsclip service and receives news release information from many
companies and alumni. Articles regarding your class and notes from classmates (including e-mail
messages) will be forwarded to you each quarter.
E-Mail/Web
Through the use of the Alumni web site (found at https://cms.amherst.edu/alumni/), alumni may
submit news for class notes as well as addresses and employment updates for college records. If you
use e-mail, a copy of the submission will be forwarded to you automatically. If you do not have an
e-mail address, the college will forward the message/s along with the quarterly news clippings.
At your request, we can also send e-mail “blasts” to all members of your class whose e-mail addresses
we have. Please notify us well in advance of the quarterly deadline if you would like us to send out
an e-mail blast. We can also send out postcards to those classmates without e-mail. You will need
to supply the text, and we can take care of the distribution.
Classmates may post their own news directly to the class news page of your class web site, and your
class contact in the Alumni Office will work with you to send out information about posting notes
online. Every class has a class news page, https://cms.amherst.edu/alumni/classpages.
Class Letters
Many secretaries have also found an annual letter to the class with a return postcard to be an
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effective way of gathering news. Not everyone will respond, though, so you should not rely on this
method alone. Mailings are coordinated through the Office of Alumni and Parent Programs.
Some secretaries produce an occasional survey of opinions, issues, and events concerning their class.
Surveys often turn up news of individual classmates which can be shared in the notes, but the
general results should be presented to the class in a follow-up letter, not in the magazine.
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“ I n M e m o r y ” Re m e m b r a n c e s
For older classes, the preparation of “In Memory” Remembrances becomes a large part of the job of
class secretary. Do not hesitate to delegate the preparation of obituaries to classmates who were
close to the deceased. In some cases, family members have been helpful in providing information
and writing portions of the notices. Remembrances prepared by others should be forwarded
directly to the Office of Alumni and Parent Programs in time for the stated deadlines.
News of the death of a classmate will be sent, along with any information received, to the class
secretary and other class officers. If the classmate is survived by a spouse, a condolence note from
the college will also be sent, inviting him or her to remain on the college mailing list.
An “In Memory” remembrance for Amherst should include the full name of the deceased, the date of
death, and a brief statement (if appropriate) of the cause of death; it should also list educational,
business, and professional accomplishments as well as survivors. In addition, the preparer of the
notice should refer to the deceased’s Amherst career and attempt to create as vivid a sense of the
deceased as possible. It is also customary to note other Amherst alumni in the deceased’s family, if
known.
Donations for an Amherst scholarship or other Amherst College fund may be noted at the end of
the remembrance; however, the College’s non-profit status prohibits it from including solicitations
for other charitable organizations. The Remembrance should not exceed 650 words due to
space considerations. Only one remembrance will be printed for the deceased. Therefore, the class
secretary should ensure that only one remembrance is submitted.
There will be cases in which the deceased person was not well known. In such cases the Amherst
College Biographical Record (published in 1973, 1983, 1993) will be the best—perhaps the only—
source of information. Your Olio might also be helpful. Be careful to avoid a “nothing much is
known about this person” tone in obituaries.
Secretaries should strive to submit an “In Memory” piece for inclusion in the issue closest to the date
of the classmate’s death. Because this is not always possible, notices of deaths received by the
Alumni Office each quarter will appear at the beginning of the “In Memory” section in the form of a
list.
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F O R M AT T I N G
Classmate vs. Non-Classmate Names
When submitting Class Notes, secretaries are strongly encouraged to use our formatting guidelines
so our typist can effectively prepare the columns. So that the reader may clearly identify classmates
in a Class column, the following guidelines will be followed.
Classmate
bold first and last names
Tim Neale
Alumni in other classes
no bold; identify class
Stan Calhoun ’94
Spouse
no bold
Cathy Neale
Widows
bold first and last names
Isabelle Reilly
Friends
no bold
Myra Gooding
Married Names
When listing married classmates, try to ascertain the name currently in use. Unless we hear
otherwise, we will print names as follows:
Name while at Amherst
Elizabeth Cannon
Classmate retains birth name
Elizabeth Cannon
Classmate uses married name
Elizabeth (Cannon) Smith
Classmate uses both names
Elizabeth Cannon Smith
For classes from 1976 to the present, secretaries are encouraged to indicate whether or not married
couples are alums: John and Mary Smith assumes Mary is an alum.
Secretary’s Name, Address, Phone Number and E-Mail Address
The name, address, phone number and e-mail address of the secretary is identified at the end of each
column. Please print or type your information at the bottom of each submission of class notes.
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D E A D L I N E S A N D P U B L I C AT I O N
Where and When the Notes Appear
Class Notes are published four times a year in Amherst. The Office of Alumni and Parent Programs
is responsible for preparing the notes section, which appears as an insert in each issue. The Public
Affairs Office prepares the remainder of the magazine. The notes are an extremely labor-intensive
project so it is vital that you adhere to the quarterly deadlines. Deadlines for the submission of your
column to the Office of Alumni and Parent Programs are listed below. The office will send a
reminder and news clippings approximately one month before the deadline.
December 1
March 1
June 1
September 1
Winter Issue
Spring Issue
Summer Issue
Fall Issue
After you have submitted your quarterly notes, we encourage you to post them on your class news
section of your class web page. For assistance, please contact your liaison in the Alumni Office.
Publication Dates vs. Submission Deadlines
Because of the time it takes to type, format, proof, and produce the notes and to assemble and print
the magazine, we urge you not to date your copy with seasonal references or use of the future tense.
If John Jones is moving to Seattle in June, and your column will appear in the summer (August)
issue, you may want to say, “John Jones moved to Seattle in June.” For most issues, you should
expect at least ten weeks (and usually more) before you see your news in print.
Getting Notes to Amherst
E-MAIL
• You may e-mail your notes to your staff liaison at Amherst or to [email protected].
• Please save your document in Rich Text Format (rtf) and send it as an attachment, if possible.
TYPED OR HANDWRITTEN
• If you type your notes, please use white paper and double spacing.
• If you hand write your notes, please write legibly on lined paper.
FAX
• Fax your column to 413-542-2042.
YOUR CONTRIBUTION IS INDISPENSABLE
The job of class secretary is a highly visible and important one to the class and the college, and you
should not hesitate to call if you encounter a situation that requires clarification. Thank you for
your efforts, your phone calls, and, most importantly, your time spent writing the notes.
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