Wedding Guests and Online RSVPs

We designed our own invitations and RSVP postcards. The full invitation reveal for the blog will come after the wedding, but to give a hint, I’ll need to record a video of my invitations for you all to get the full effect.  But, here’s the front of our RSVP postcard, just to give a taste:

In addition to our RSVP postcards, we offered our guests an online RSVP option. I had read on a few wedding advice sites that online RSVPs aren’t a good idea. 

• To state the obvious, not everyone is comfortable using technology or even has the technology to reply online
• Using a mixed online RSVP / paper RSVP is just too complicated

But, we decided to give it a whirl. Our RSVP postcards included the following RSVP options:

1. Gladly Attend
2. Regretfully Decline
3. This postcard is so 20th century. I’ll RSVP online at www.[InsertOurWeddingWebsiteHere].com

We simply included an “RSVP Here!” page on our website. On that page, we embedded a Google Form that we created. Our Google Form contained the following fields:

1. Name
2. Can you attend? (Y/N)
3. Names of Adults Attending (Large text box)
4. How many Children Attending (Small text box)
5. Names and ages of Children Attending (Large text box)
6. Your e-mail address (small text box). in case we need to send last minute updates!
7. Notes (large text box)

Out of the 44 RSVPs we received thus far (for a total of 122 people, or 42% of all the people that we’ve invited), 20 of those RSVPs were submitted online!  That’s 45%. I think that’s a damn good online RSVP rate. And it’s not demographically predictable. We’ve had folks in their 60s RSVP online and folks in their 20s mail in their RSVP.

As an added bonus, we also use the RSVP form ourselves. When we receive an RSVP in the mail, we enter the information right away into the online form. Then we just have one spreadsheet to track all the RSVPs! And, I’d just like to point out that Ken has taken the lead on tracking the RSVPs and is doing a great job.

I’m so lucky to have an involved groom!