There is a long standing tradition of including a response card, with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, with your formal invitation. The host sent the invitations out approximately 8 weeks prior to the event. The guests checked the appropriate box on the response card – hopefully, they also put their name on it – and returned it via the mail. As the response cards came, the host manually tallied up the responses.
Now we are in the computer age. We have desktop computers, laptop computers, tablets, smartphones – we are on the internet all day, every day. Our children are growing up online, and even our grandparents have entered the internet age.
So….the question is — has it become acceptable to send out an invitation to a formal event, and request that the guests respond online? The answer is…??
Some people would say – absolutely not. The internet is informal, and the response cards are tradition. They might also say that the older generation who are invited to their event would consider it “unclassy”. Others will argue that we are in a technological era. Times have changed, and so should we. We may want to send a “hard copy” invitation that people can hang on to, but we don’t want to waste the paper and stamp on the response card. It is so much easier to keep track of the responses via the computer, and you don’t run the risk of receiving a response with no name attached.
If you order your invitations through Let’s Go Invite!, you receive your own free website just for your event. On that website, your guests can submit their responses. You can even tailor the questions that you want included. Do you want just their names? Do you want the names and ages of each guest (so you can sort adults and children)? Do you need to tell your caterer how many guests are vegetarians? Do you need to know how many guests need hotel accommodations? All those questions, and any others that you can think of, can be included on your own personalized response page. Then you can download the responses and sort them any way you want. At Let’s Go Invite!, we believe that you can use today’s technology, while still keeping the formality of your event. But that is just our opinion.
The right answer — is completely up to you!!!