e-invites for 5-yr-old birthday - do we send to both parents? How?

March 5, 2020 5:02 PM

We are sending out email invites for the birthday party for our son who is turning five. We're inviting around 15 kids, and their parents (and probably the odd sibling?) We have the email addresses of all the parents. In two-parent families - do we contact both parents, or choose one? Does evite or some other service make this easier?

It seems nice to email both parents, but it seems like a logistical hassle, where a family might RSVP twice. Is there a best practice here? Inviting just one parent seems impolite (and introduces the awkward question of which parent to invite).

posted by ManInSuit to Society & Culture (16 answers total)

Best answer: I always email both members of a couple (for family parties and just adult events), and almost always one answers and the other doesn't. Occasionally neither answers. I've never had both answer.

The RSVP list in evite shows who responded, so if there is a double reply, you'll be able to see and adjust your head count accordingly.
posted by gideonfrog at 5:10 PM on March 5, 2020 [8 favorites]

I get e-vites for all sorts of things that come to both me & my husband. It's fine, we handle it. It's few enough invites that you can scan the list and if one family responded twice you will see it. Just invite everyone you have an email address for.
posted by brainmouse at 5:11 PM on March 5, 2020

I usually email both, because I who knows who checks their email. When both my wife and I get an evite we usually check with the other before replying and if not it gets sorted out.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 5:19 PM on March 5, 2020

Response by poster: (Thanks! Do you guys use regular old email, or evite or something?)
posted by ManInSuit at 5:20 PM on March 5, 2020

Best answer: Personally I never respond to invitations through evite, and I'd be annoyed if some stranger gave my email address to a third-party commercial service, especially one with a major data breach in their history, like evite. It's only 15 invitations, just send 15 emails, with two recipients on each of the emails as necessary. (And don't assume that the parents are always a couple.)
posted by Umami Dearest at 5:41 PM on March 5, 2020 [5 favorites]

I would recommend emailing both (or all, if there are more than two) parents you have contact info for unless there is a solid reason not to. You don't necessarily know who deals with what, and there are lots of reasons not to reinforce traditional ideas about which parent takes care of what.
posted by bile and syntax at 5:58 PM on March 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

Definitely use Evite. Definitely send invites to all the adults. There are only 15 kids being invited, and you won't have any difficulty sorting out double RSVPs. Source: a parent of a now-16yo who has been using Evite forever for my kid's birthday parties.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:38 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'd be annoyed if some stranger gave my email address to a third-party commercial service, especially one with a major data breach in their history, like evite

Seconded.
posted by flabdablet at 8:29 PM on March 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

Any email client should be able to handle delivering a single email to 30 recipients in one hit without any issues. Just address it to: Undisclosed Recipients <[e-mail]> and bcc: it to all the parents. There's probably less work in that than there would be in uploading their addresses to evite.
posted by flabdablet at 8:45 PM on March 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

It seems nice to email both parents, but it seems like a logistical hassle, where a family might RSVP twice.

Why is accidentally RSVPing twice "a logistical hassle"?

Our schools will give out paper invites if you give the invites to the teacher. We usually also do a follow-up text on WhatsApp to parents who haven't RSVPed in case the invite goes missing.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:08 AM on March 6, 2020

I always invite both parents; you never know which is the parent better at handling invites, or which e-mail address is out of date since the directory was printed.

eVite SHOULD (I don't use it, I say this as a programmer) have a way to look at the full list of responses, and let you do a hand count. Even if only one parent responds, there's a chance they hit yes and click OK without updating the count, giving you a smaller total count.
posted by JawnBigboote at 4:22 AM on March 6, 2020

Response by poster: Thanks! This is super-helpful. Looks like the "anti-evite" contingent is bigger than the "pro-evite" contingent. I'm curious- for those who do like evite better than just emailing - what do you like about it?
posted by ManInSuit at 6:45 AM on March 6, 2020

as a recipient, i don't care if it's an evite or an email. evite is kind of nice because you can see who else replied and what their response was.

as an organizer, evite all the way. then you don't have to keep track of stuff in excel or a piece of paper, because evite does it for you.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 7:23 AM on March 6, 2020

As a pro-Evite person: Evite reminds you a few days before the event of the current RSVP statuses, which is good as it points out who may not have RSVP'd at all so you can follow up.
posted by BlahLaLa at 9:20 AM on March 6, 2020

I use paperlesspost.com for my kid's stuff. It's amazing and easy - gathers RSVPs, allows for custom questions on RSVPs, and can schedule reminders for people who haven't answered. It also tracks the opened/responded/not opened for the email so you know if they read it.
posted by Suffocating Kitty at 11:19 AM on March 6, 2020

If you do regular email, you can also generate an .ics calendar event to attach to the email which people can just import into their calendars. I think you can include reminders in it, but not sure.
posted by bendy at 8:39 PM on March 7, 2020