I'm throwing my husband a 30th birthday party and am planning on sending out one of my invitation designs, why not? A small price to pay for advertising, plus I feel it's much more personal receiving an actual invitation in the mail. I feel we've gone too far away from the personal touch of hand-held invitations with the invention of the internet. Some people send out a mass email inviting people or use websites such as Evite. I understand you save money this way, but if you're throwing a party spending hundreds of dollars on food, drinks and decorations, why not throw in an extra $30-50 for personalized custom invitations?
Another problem I have with email or eviting your guests is that I've found that too many people attend based on who else is invited. I've been guilty of it myself, if I'm not going to know anyone, who am I going to talk to? Yes, I should put myself out there to meet new people shouldn't I? That's one of the beauties of an actual mailed invitation, the element of surprise on who's going to be there. If there isn't anyone you know there, you're forced to make small talk with strangers and who knows, you may end up meeting some pretty special people and create new friendships out of the deal!
If you've never gotten an Evite, it works like this: You set up your list of guests, send it out and when your guests log into the invitation you see everyone that was invited. You also see how people respond to the invitation, whether or not they're coming. I've talked to others about this and they agree. You don't want to believe that people would do this type of thing, but the sad truth is they do. Oh, and I forgot to mention, that if you're the sender of an evite you get to see when people open their invitation and when they respond. It's not a very good feeling when someone opens it, but then never responds. You know they got it, so why not just tell you yes or no, it's not that hard.
The other thing is that if you know someone that's "famous" and are inviting them, everyone else you're inviting will see that this "famous" person is invited. I hate to say it, but again, people will react to this type of a situation and come in hopes that they too will get to mingle with them and say to their friends "Guess who I'm hanging out with tonight!". It really sucks as the host that your friends would come based on something like this. And like I said, you don't want to think that your friends will react this way, but chances are that they might. Can you blame them? Put yourself in their shoes. Say a friend of yours knows Matthew McConaughey and you see his name on the list, wouldn't you like to get one chance to see what he's like in person compared to what you see in the movies? I'm not saying all people would react this way, some people don't give a darn, but there are those that do.
I've used evite once and got completely burned when 12 out of 12 guests didn't end up coming, It didn't matter that I sent the evitation out 5 weeks in advance for them to plan ahead. Since I had bought everything for the party I had to do something, so I invited another bunch of my friends, all who showed up. Not many knew each other, but it was a fun time anyway. Lesson learned!
So those are some reasons why I think people should go back to doing regular mailed invitations for any type of occassion. I'm working on getting together some less "girly" styled invitations for boy type parties. But if you're a girl throwing a party, any of my wedding invitation designs can be changed to any party that you decide to throw.
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