One of the benefits of having a blog is that you occasionally get to vent or state a controversial opinion! This past weekend we had a big dance birthday party for our daughter who was celebrating finally turning 13! We were able to secure a local hall and a friend of our is a D.J. so we had all of our ducks in row for a great time! Just over 50 kids were invited and we had pop, chips, dips, candy and cake pops for all. The invitations were hand delivered one week in advance and each invitation include a typed out note (primarily for the parents sake) of what the party would entail. The party had been discussed among my daughter's peers (with a date established) for about 2 weeks before the actual invitations went out.RSVP Definition
(taken from www.businessdictionary.com)
An abbreviation often included in invitations to request that the invitee let the host know if he or she will be attending. From the French term, "Répondez si'l vous plaît," which means "please reply."
I know that R.S.V.P.s seem to be a somewhat lost art these days so I thought I had made it easy by including both our home phone, my cell phone and my email to easily facilitate a response back. Do you know that out of over 50 invites we only had about 10 people actually contact us to R.S.V.P.......
Planning a party of this size takes some doing especially since you don't actually know how many people will show up. We went ahead and planned for 50 - needless to say we brought home lots of pop, chips and candy as only about 20 showed up. I realize that R.S.V.P.ing is a dying art form, but not only did people not R.S.V.P. to the party we had also invited 10 girls to the sleep over and out of those only 5 slept over and R.S.V.P.'ed.
Am I wrong to criticize? How do you plan a wedding or other large event where the cost is based upon the number of attendees? What could I have done differently? I would love to hear your comments on this!
By the way.....I have to confess, I have been guilty of not RSVPing too, but from now on I plan to personally RSVP to each invite that I or a member of my family gets!
ReplyDeleteYou are sooo not wrong to criticize. This is my all time pet peeve! My husband has a huge family and when I send out invitations to parties, they NEVER RSVP. It is so hard to plan on the amount of food when people are not thoughtful. I've gotten snippy lately and I will call them if I haven't heard from them. I just say - I'm trying to plan food and you haven't RSVP'd, and I really need to know if your coming. Unfortunately they aren't getting the hint.sigh
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First of all I feel bad for the child who invites that many people and not even half show up and only half of the girls stayed for the sleep over. For the R.S.V.P`s you don`t only let the host of the party know that you are coming you are also suppose to let them know if you are not coming. People assume that if you don`t get a response back that you are suppose to know that they are not coming. These invites were hand delivered to the kids or parents? If they were passed out to the kids I doubt if most of the parents even saw the invitation. I use to find my son`s invitations after the fact and would ask him why he didn`t show me before hand and he would say because he didn`t want to go. All in all I hope your daughter had a good time.
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