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Clearing Up the Confusion E-Zine Vol 02 Issue 15
------- 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.
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In This Issue...
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1. Article: Evite -- Good and Bad
2. Shameless Self-Promotion
3. The Fine Print
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1. Article: Evite -- Good and Bad
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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
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2. Shameless Self-Promotion
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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.
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3. The Fine Print
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