------- Clearing Up the Confusion E-Zine ------- Vol 2, Issue 15 Earlier this year I wrote an article about the relative benefits of Evite and Socializr, two online invitation services. We used Evite recently to invite a large group of people to my mom's birthday party. I thought I would report on our experience, if only so others can appreciate the good aspects of the service and be prepared for those areas where we ran into problems. ---------------------------------------------------------------- In This Issue... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Article: Evite -- Good and Bad 2. Shameless Self-Promotion 3. The Fine Print ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Article: Evite -- Good and Bad ---------------------------------------------------------------- We just got back from throwing a big birthday bash for my mom, Debby Peters of CNP of Ohio, Ltd (http://cnpofohio.com). I'm not going to say which birthday it was, but it had a zero at the end. We invited a lot of people. In order to simplify the invitations (or so we thought) we decided to use Evite (http://evite.com). In some ways, this was pretty convenient. In others, it caused some problems. First, the good: 1. It saved us a lot of money. We sent out around three hundred invitations for the event. Doing a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation, just the postage on such a mailing would have run close to $150 (assuming we had stamped RSVP cards). Add in the cost of printing invitations and we're talking quite a chunk of cash. 2. It saved us a lot of time. Anyone who has ever helped out with a wedding knows that addressing, stuffing, and sending out the invitations can be a bit of a time-consuming endeavor. Of course, for an event like a wedding, many think that it's worth all of the effort. With Evite, we were able to compile the list of recipient email addresses in less than an hour. That gave us a lot more time for important stuff, like picking out the birthday cake! 3. RSVP's are easy. When you set up an event using Evite, part of the page that the invitees see is a simple RSVP interface. They can click on "Yes", "No", or even "Maybe" and they can leave a short explanatory message. 4. RSVP's are more likely. The only way for someone to find out the details of the party is to go to the Evite page for the event. Right away they see the RSVP feature. Conceivably, this makes them more likely to let you know one way or the other whether they will be showing up or not. You'll note I said "conceivably" there. Keep reading. 5. Checking the status fairly straight forward. As the "organizer" I could check the page to see how many responses of each type we had received. It was also pretty simple to send out a message to any group or subgroup of the guest list. I could fire off a quick message to those who had not responded to remind them that we'd love to see them there and then send one out to the "Yes" list to remind them that they might need some sunscreen. So, what could be wrong with that? It sounds like the system should work just fine. Well, yes, the system worked just fine, in and of itself, the problems actually arose when the system had to navigate the obstacles on the 'Net and society in general. In particular: 1. Mail filters. About one-third of the guest list didn't even look at the invitation. Now maybe some of these didn't want to be bothered, but I'm pretty sure that a large portion of them just didn't receive the message. Some SPAM filter somewhere trapped it and it didn't go a step further. If you only have a few guests, this isn't a big problem. You can just keep an eye on the responses and, after a week or so, personally contact those who have neither responded nor even looked at the message. Unfortunately, with about 100 people who hadn't looked at the message, making personal calls to each and every one would have been prohibitive. 2. Technophobes. These are the folks who are just a little uncomfortable with using such systems in general. Maybe they just don't have the experience or maybe they just hate the 'Net on principle. Either way, I had more than a few people claim that they had responded, but it hadn't registered with Evite. I suspect that they had clicked on their response, but had forgotten to click on the "Submit" button This is something that Evite could easily fix. They would just have to set up the page so clicking on the radio button for your response would automatically register that response on the guest list. 3. People who don't RSVP. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there's any way to deal with this. Apparently some folks just don't know what "RSVP" means. I know that this is a problem, though, even with printed invitations with addressed and stamped return cards. So, given these issues, we ended up only getting responses from about one-third of the potential guests. Now the interesting thing was, approximately the same number who said they would be there actually showed up. We didn't have to many "drop-ins" or at least those we had were offset by those who said they would come but weren't able at the last minute. So, in this case at any rate, counting the non-responses as No's would have worked out just fine. I can't make any claim, however, that this would be the case with all events. The upshot of our experience is that Evite works very well with a smaller party or one where the guest list is more tech-savvy. It works the best where it can act as a first line of response which severely limits the number of personal phone calls or emails that the organizer has to make in order to determine a reasonably accurate count of who is coming. For a larger event, especially where an accurate count is more important, having a backup plan (perhaps multiple helpers who are willing to contact the non-responders) is a necessity. If you've had experience using Evite or one of the other electronic invitation services, I would love to hear your story. Drop me a line at gpeters@cyberdatasolutionsllc.com. Copyright 2008, Greg Peters ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Shameless Self-Promotion ---------------------------------------------------------------- The "Clearing Up the Confusion" E-Zine is a production of Greg Peters, owner, chief cook, and bottlewasher of Cyber Data Solutions. CDS has been helping website designers develop better web presence for their clients for more than a decade. Visit us on the Web at www.cyberdatasolns.com to see how we can help your webmaster. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 3. 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