evite Review

I was not actually the person to find Evite which would probably surprise a lot of people who know I'm always seeking new and fun things online.  It was a friend of mine who was having a big New Year's bash back in 2004.  I thought the site was cool right off the bat, but I was leery of using it for myself thinking that it was too informal OR too cumbersome for little parties.  Now, 4 years later, I totally love this site!  Read on to find out why...

What is it?
It's exactly what it sounds like Evite = Electronic Invite.  The simple description is that it allows you to send a mass invitation to any group of people, as long as you have their email address.  Those people can then easily and quickly RSVP right on the site with a Yes, No or a Maybe.  A reminder is automatically sent to the people who said Yes or the people who did not respond a number of days before the event.  All of this is AWESOME because now you have solved a bunch of common party RSVP problems.

A) You KNOW if they said Yes or No (or Maybe) instead of wondering "did they get my invite in the mail?"
B) You have a record of their response... as opposed to having them call you and then you forget to write down who that was that said YES and who said NO and now you can't remember who's coming
C) The guests simply cannot lose the invite!  No putting it in a pile of papers and forgetting them
D) You don't have to call everyone you know to get their home address to send them a physical invite, and you probably already have everyone's email address
E) The auto reminders are a friendly way of reminding people to respond who forgot because you aren't calling to bug them, they think the website is just doing that
F) Finally, guests are often more likely to commit to an evite than they are to call you over the phone

If the simple invite/rsvp is all you want to do with this site, that's great!  If not, the site offers a lot of other cool features.

Creating an Invite
Invites are super easy to make.  They have a lot of designs to choose from and I'm sometimes amazed about the choices that are available that perfectly match the party I'm planning.  For my wedding rehearsal, we were having pizza, and I found a nice Pizza theme invite.  Today's invite was for a poker party my husband is having next month and they had plenty of Poker themed invites.  Viewing the list of themes sometimes even gives me an idea for a party.  Now their top theme on the list is a tiki/outdoor party and I'm thinking that sounds like a good idea :)

Once you choose a theme, a form allows you to fill in all the details - time, place, description, and a comment box that you can use bold, font sizes, and more to say everything you want. My one complaint with this is that it is a bit too small of a box.  It let's you type A LOT, but it's hard to type A LOT in the small box.  Other than that, it's easy to use.

The final step is to add your guests simply by listing their email addresses.  Once you hit Send, they get the invite and can click a link to view the details and RSVP. 

Additional Features
There are a few additional features I like about this site.  For one, you can choose whether or not to allow your guests to share the evite with others.  So let's say you were having an "anyone" type party, you could allow your guests to pass the invite on to their friends and their friends would RSVP as well.  You can also allow your guests to write in +1, 2, etc if they plan to bring friends.  OR on the opposite side of things, for my rehearsal dinner no additional people were invited, so I turned off these options. 

You can post a poll like "what movie should I rent?" or "what's your favorite board game?"  Guests can respond to the poll when they RSVP.  It's nice because not only can you collect the responses, but the other guests can also see the responses which makes it easy to collaborate rather than making one person plan the enter event.  In addition to this, there is a feature that allows you to let guests suggest a date and time.  If you want to plan a get together but don't have specific dates in mind, the suggest date/time works to let guests work together to determine a good time.

I like the "ask your guests to bring something" feature, but I haven't used it yet.  Most my parties are planned by me completely, but I think it's a cool feature.  You can list things you want guests to bring like Soda, Salad, Biscuits, etc.  Then guests can select one of these options from the list when they RSVP.  Now you'll no longer have the problem of 5 people showing up with dip and no one bringing chips.  Once again, having to mark it online makes it more of a commitment then if they tell you over the phone.

You don't have to be having a large party to use this!
My sister told me her and her friends now use evite to plan their outings, even though there are only a handful of them.  She says it really helps because now they don't have emails going back and forth.  Instead they use the "suggest a date/time" feature to get started, and then all the suggestions are tracked on the website for everyone to see.

I wish I had more reason to use this and more parties to throw :-D  But I do try to use it whenever I can.  Tonight my husband was all ready to send a mass email to friends about his poker party, and I said "but how are you going to track responses?" and talked him into an evite.  Not only does it look really fun and nice (as opposed to a text only email) but we also already got a couple of Yes responses.  It just feels more official when it's an evite.  Now I'm not saying you'll replace your wedding invites with an evite, but why not use them for your rehearsal dinner? your graduation party? etc etc. 

If you have relatives that are still offline, you could always send those people a physical invitation separately.  From my experience, no one has been confused about how to RSVP.  So check out Evite today and Party on!