Interactive humpday: Invitation showdown
It’s hard to believe, but some people out there actually like invitation websites like evite, and aren’t afraid to admit it in public. Shocking, isn’t it?
Well, let’s see if I’m all alone in my stand against them.
How do you like your invitations?
(This is the kickoff for a new thing I want to do, by the way: Interactive Humpday is your chance to either vote or write about some vital and fascinating point of geek etiquette. It’ll be happening every Wednesday that I remember to do it: Wednesday evening my time, and hopefully Wednesday morning for those in the US or Europe.)
7 Comments so far
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I’ve realized that public sites like evite (with as little registration as possible) is a good solution when you’re inviting large numbers of people. Since it keeps track of responses for you AND allows the people you’ve invited to also invite friends, it simplifies the invitation/response process for the host.
Smaller events (10 people or less), I’ll use email or the telephone to talk to each guest separately. As a guest, my only preference is that the details be written down somewhere I can find them.
No, no: you need to use tickyboxes! Because, if course, It Depends. I tend to use both LJ & email for nearly all invitations, but I find that sites like evite are much better at eliciting RSVPs than ordinary email or other forms of invitation, and so I tend to use evite (in addition to or instead of, depending) for things where I NEED to know whether people are showing up (dinner parties, for example).
LJ is good for things that require feedback from multiple people, like road trips. I find email most efficient for casual events with few people.
In short, it all depends on what kind of event it is, how much organizing will have been done by the time the invitation goes out, and how many people are invited.
I like facebook, LiveJournal, and email, which my friendship group uses in roughly that order. There are more of us on LJ, but facebook has very good support for event organisation, so it’s starting to take over in that area.
I’m amazed at how much I prefer evite over more traditional forms.
For a birthday party I hosted a while back, I tried to get people’s postal addresses to send them all a personal invitation and it was a nightmare realizing how many people I had never gotten that information from, and how many people were so hesitant to give it to me, and these were my close friends!
Though I do feel that evite needs its own course on invitation etiquette with regards to expectations of the host and the guests. Invites should still be well worded, beyond the basic time/place, and guests should be informed of the must-have-response date. Additionally guests should restrict evite comments to the social theme of the guest list (being funny or snarky or saying who/what you’ll bring).
I recall using evite and a guest responded “No” near the last minute, and in his comments made it quite clear that there was another event the same night that he’d much rather attend. This didn’t win him any favor with me, but other responders started changing their comments to rake him over the coals. It wasn’t pretty.
I agree with Anitra that evite works very well for large events, but for the smaller ones, a personal touch is always best whether it’s via e-mail or telephone.
It’s interesting that while the majority (23 out of 27 as I post this) voted for email, all the comments are supporting invitation websites (e.g. evite, facebook, etc).
I’m not voting since I agree with rs - it all depends on the situation. evite wins most of the time for my needs since if I’m sending invitations, I probably want RSVPs.
Also, the vast majority of my friends tend to be non-techy, and most of them like the convenience of evite, and when I just send emails, I’ll often get asked “so why didn’t you make an evite?”
“When in Rome . . . “
I dislike eVite for a few reasons. First, they send me HTML mail, which is just rude (and largely illegible, as it turns out; perhaps they do it poorly too). Second, who knows what they’re doing with my email address? Third, I don’t know — and do not feel it’s my problem to find out — which of these sites are legitimate, which are just spam-bait, and which are loaded up with malware waiting for me to visit.
It’s just not that hard to manage email responses. Create three folders — yes, no, maybe — and sort your replies. If you don’t want to have to do math for replies that include multiple people, dump N copies of the reply (one per person) into the folder. Or something else. I’ve never invited more than about 100 people to something at a time, but I had no problems with manual tallying in that case. I already had a text file with the names of invitees, and I just moved names into buckets as the replies came in. Easy, and I could tell who I hadn’t heard from. If I were doing 500 or 1000 people instead, I’d write a script. But I wouldn’t impose a burden on my invitees.
Depends on the event and the size. The more formal the event, go with a real invitation. But for a casual gathering, dinner, hanging out an evite will suffice. Sad but true, you do get a much better RSVP rate from evites these days!
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