Though I adore an old-fashioned letterpress invitation sent through the mail, with busy lives and hundreds of birthday and holiday parties, online invites have become the trend. I was gifted a signed first edition of Emily Post’s Everyday Etiquette from my Great Aunt, yet there is no chapter on the etiquette of online invitations! One of the great benefits, besides being thrifty, is that digital invites are great for the environment and are becoming more and more accepted. But what are some of the do’s and don’ts?

Birthday inviteThe Do’s of Online Invitations

  1. Specify who you are inviting – you never want ambiguity about whether a birthday invite includes siblings or parents.
  2. If you see that a recipient hasn’t opened the invite, it may have ended up in a spam filter so you should follow up with a call or additional email well in advance of the event.
  3. Older generations may still feel queasy about this form of invite, so a personal phonecall or even better – a paper invite is a great idea. Companies like Paperless Post can do digital invitations as well as paper in the same pattern.
  4. Choose an appropriate invite for the event. A casual design for a formal business function isn’t necessarily the best idea.
  5. The beauty of digital is that there is lots of space for words and explanation – make the guests’ life as easy as possible by including details like directions and cell phone numbers.

Canada Day InviteThe Don’ts of Online Invitations

  1. Be careful about your guest lists. You have the option to hide the list or not and different situations call for different tactics. It is sometimes super helpful to see who else in going to a birthday party, for instance, when you’d like to carpool with another family.
  2. Don’t add extra attendees at the last minute – especially if they can see that others replied a week ago…
  3. Be careful of sending an invite to your whole contact list. The turnout probably won’t be as good and that just feels spammy.

Whatever your event – it’s great to utilize the internet to save time so that you can pay more attention to the actual entertaining!

Share: