How to Word Invitations

Two Other Pages to Read

Computer Savvy Hosts

Name Your Event

Character Limit

Beginning of Message/Invitation

Pre- and Post-Parties

Two Other Pages to Read

In addition to this page, you should read:
My criteria for sending invitations
How to setup an Evite invitation

A lot of the people who ask me to publicize their events are computer challenged. Even though I believe the instructions I've written are clear, many are just not able to figure out how to create an Evite invitation and to transfer the organizer to me. If you are part of a committee that is sponsoring an event, the person who reads these instructions, who creates the Evite invitation, and who interfaces with me should be the most computer-savvy person on your committee. If the person I end up dealing with does not know much about computers, I'm simply going to ask that someone else start the process from scratch, which will obviously slow things down.

To repeat — Please assign the most computer-savvy person to create an Evite invitation and to interface with me. Thanks!.

If you're hosting your event solo, or no one on your committee knows much about computers, it would be best if you asked a friend of yours who does know a lot about computers to read these instructions and to help you create the Evite invitation.

Information to Include

Your Evite invitation should have all of the information one would need to know about the event, without the user having to click to another Web site and without having to e-mail or telephone someone. At a minimum, please include all of the following, unless for some reason a particular item is not appropriate.

Name Your Event

When you create your Evite, under "Name Your Event," you must begin with the day and date (including year) of the event, followed by " -- " and then whatever name you want. For example, "Monday, July 18 -- Junior League Martini Madness". See how to setup an Evite invitation.

Character Limit

Evite has a limit of 3000 characters for your message/invitation, including spaces. "3000 characters" means 3000 characters, not 3000 words. "Including spaces" means that spaces are included in the character count, not that characters do not count.

I usually add some commentary, such as canned language about what people should do if they want to removed from the invitation list, etc. Thus, your message/invitation must not exceed 2000 characters, including spaces. You can count the number of spaces using Microsoft Word:

Tools / Word Count / Look at "Characters (with spaces)"

If you don't have Word, you'll have to figure out how your word processing package counts characters, or count them manually.

Please do not prepare Evites for me to send with messages/invitations that exceed 2000 characters, including spaces.

When you create your Evite invitation, Evite will count how many characters you have used. One would logically think that Evite's count would be equal to or very close to the number of characters that Microsoft Word comes up with. If one thought this, one would be wrong. I find that if you have approximately 2750 characters including spaces according to Word, Evite will count that as approximately 3000 characters. Perhaps there are hidden control/formatting characters that Evite is counting and Word is not, I simply don't know. So take that into account when you create your invitation.