Managing your Wedding Guests, Invitations, RSVPs with wedjinni
Ah.. the guests…. we love them but they are so hard to manage…
Every wedding regardless of tradition, religion, language, size, always have at least *some* guests. If there is just a handful of them, then everything is simple. You can just write them down on a piece of paper and you are done. But, that’s not the case most of the times. The wedding guests are from some dozens to some hundreds and in rare occasions some thousands. How do you manage them? How do you update all their data while you obtain them and how do you keep everything organized, searchable and easy to update?
You know I am going to say with Wedjinni!
Lets see some tips for utilizing wedjinni’s capabilities for managing your wedding guests.
1. Settings
I know that you weren’t expecting to begin from settings but this is actually where some of the wedjinni guests’ managing magic begins. Choose the settings option at the top of the screen while you are logged into your account and go to “Application Settings”. You will see an option for choosing a “Simple RSVP Facility” to manage your invitations and a “Manual Mode”. The latter, offers you two more options: Setting all guests as “Invited to Reception” or not and notifying wedjinni if “Your guests are going to notify you if they cannot attend” -much like a simpler rsvp here-.
By correctly setting this option, you will be able to manage your invitations in depth and to feed wedjnni with all necessary information to help you do it.
Choosing the correct settings will help you manage your wedding invitations better
2. Creating Categories
Categorizing your guests, is a perfect way to make long lists short. Wedjinni offers you the option to name your categories as you like, by simply renaming the categories’ tab. Just double click on the name to change it. Be careful though: If you choose to delete a category, all entries in it will be removed as well!
Creating categories for your invitations will make it easy to keep your wedding guests organized
3. Importing your Facebook Friends
Today’s social media impact in our daily lives is more obvious than ever. We can easily say that we have moved from the information-era to the social-networking era. This, has some good sides though: Having a big online social network, will help you get information about your friends quickly and import those friends into wedjinni with the twinkling of an eye (as a distant cousin of our jinni says). Just authorize the wedjinni facebook app by clicking on the relevant link and you will be able to choose multiple Facebook friends to add them into specific categories. You may change their details after, by adding more info to their records. And don’t worry: the jinni knows how to keep a secret. Will never tell anyone that you invited or not invited him unless you want to.
adding your facebook friends directly into wedjinni can speed up the data entry process.
4. Detailing the list
Creating the guest list of your wedding, is a time-consuming task which begins early in your wedding planning schedule and might end just before the wedding! Managing this list seems easy at the beginning but it isn’t. Be sure to add as many details as you can while you create an invitation, and visit the invitations section regularly to make updates. Add the friendly name (i.e. Uncle Joe) but be sure to also add the recipient’s name as you would like it to be printed on the invitation’s envelope. This way, you will be able to spot specific persons easily (the friendly name appears on the minimized version of the invitation) but will also keep secret that you never remember what the name of that fat aunt is…
Also be sure to check how many adults and how many children are in every specific invitation. This will help you manage the meals and the entertainers that you will need for the kids easily when the time comes.
Add details to your wedding invitations. It will be easier to send them or print them when you need to.
5. Star them
Some of your guests are your vips. They are your very close relatives, friends and importan people in general. You may want to keep those people on the top of your lists so you can easily spot them in the crowd. Every invitation, has a little star icon in front of the friendly name. Click on it, and this particular invitation will be always pinned at the top of your list.
your wedding vips can be pinned on the top of the list with the star option.
6. Mind the coloring in the number
It’s easy to lose track of who is coming and who isn’t when you look in a big number of invitations. The little number at the right of the invitation, shows not only the number of persons an invitation has, but also if they are attending (green), not attending (red) or not responded status (blue). In case you have all settings at their simplest form, the color remains blue.
7. Check the stats
The invitations’ section stats, has a great deal of information to help you out. It will show you in real time, how many people are invited in your wedding, how many invitations you will need to send and also all your guests’ RSVP responses broken down to invitations and persons and even categories. Now you know that 2 of your ivitations to friends were never responded and 3 specific persons you invited will not be attending (phew).
You can get detailed information in real time about your wedding invitations, your guests and your rsvp status.
8. Import / Export will help you catch-up.
In case you already managed a lot of guests with a spreadsheet, you can import your lists in wedjinni with the import from csv option. The same goes, if you want to export your list to continue editing or sending it to a print facility. Wedjinni can help you do as much work as you want with it and will not complain if you decide to continue somewhere else.
Managing your wedding invitations and guests is one of the most difficult tasks that you will face while planning your wedding. Wedjinni will help you make thi task enjoyable, easy and why not, funny. Stay tuned. Before final launch, we ‘ll allow you to also send your rsvps via email and also get responses directly into wedjinni so you can stay calm and watch the Dashoboard getting the responses. Cool huh?
UPDATE 07/19/2013: Now you can send your invitations or RSVPs to your guests by email right from wedjinni’s interface. Your guests can respond whether they are attending or not and even put a comment in their invitation!
Coming up next: Managing your Wedding Reception with Wedjinni
