Tracking invitees and guests in Outlook

June 18, 2010 10:55 AM

Really picky Outlook 2007 Meeting Invite Question: We are having a summer picnic at work and want to keep track of RSVPs. A co-worker sent out a meeting invite to all of the invited staff. Staff members can also bring guests. Of course we can track the staff member RSVPs easily, but is there a way to track the number of non-staff member guests?

I know you can forward meeting invites to other people and then the other person can respond, but some of the guests are little kids.

Currently, a staff member sends the response and writes the number of guests in the body of the response. My co-worker then writes down the number and then will add them all up at the end.

posted by soupy to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Sounds to me like you probably picked the best solution within Outlook. The only other thing I could think to do would be to include voting buttons for number of guests (maybe 0,1,2,3,4,4+), but then you'd have to send a separate invite if you wanted it on people's calendar.

The easiest solution I can think of if you have tons of guests would be to ask recipients to fill out a web form to RSVP, and collect the number of guests in the form.
posted by _Silky_ at 11:21 AM on June 18, 2010

I'm not sure of a way to do this, but you could have an additional email go out with a poll and then add the respective yes/accept votes together. It doesn't appear as though you can add a poll to a meeting maker though.
posted by questionsandanchors at 11:22 AM on June 18, 2010

May not work for your situation as a company event, but I'll offer it up in case others are reading this and looking for a solution for a different type of event: Meetup.com has that feature. You RSVP for yourself and they have a field "and I'm bringing ___ guests". Then the RSVP total in increased to include both respondents and guests.
posted by CathyG at 11:39 AM on June 18, 2010

Outlook has voting buttons that are exactly for this purpose. It's under "Options" when writing the email.
posted by Simon Barclay at 6:09 PM on June 18, 2010