Add to calendar, in one tap

The tap that puts your date into a guest’s own calendar is the difference between someone who means to come and someone who is actually free that day. It sits on the invitation itself: one tap on a phone opens Google Calendar or Apple Calendar with your date, time and venue filled in. One thing to say plainly at the top. We do not send reminders to your guests. The entry lands in their own calendar, and their own calendar app does whatever nudging happens after that.

The gap between yes and the day

Months pass between the evening someone opens your invitation and the morning of your wedding. Here is what happens in that gap:

• Someone reads it on the bus, means to reply properly when they get home, and never writes anything down.
• Someone books a fortnight away without checking, and learns about the clash when the flights are non-refundable.
• Someone accepts, then a work trip lands on the same Saturday. Yours is the one nobody wrote down, so yours gives way.
• Someone has the date but not the time, and arrives while the ceremony is halfway through.

None of these are people who do not care about you. They are people whose diary lives somewhere other than your invitation. The calendar tap moves your date out of a page they read once and into the thing they check every morning.

Why the tap has to be on the invitation

You can ask guests to save the date in a separate message. Some will. Most will read it, think yes, I must do that, and put the phone down. Every step between reading and saving loses people, and switching apps is a large step.

Putting the button on the invitation catches them at the one moment when your wedding is the thing in front of them, with the details right there on the screen. Nothing is typed in from memory, and nothing lands on the wrong Saturday.

A save the date does the same work earlier, and the sooner a date is in someone’s calendar the less likely a holiday is booked over it. It usually goes out before the venue and the times are settled, though, so the invitation is still the one carrying the details worth saving.

What a good calendar entry should contain

Most entries guests make for themselves are two words and a date, and six months later nobody knows what they mean. A useful entry has:

• Your names in the title. “Amara and Nuwan - Reception” still reads in six months. “Reception” does not.
• Which of your events it is, if you are holding more than one.
• A start time and an end time. An entry with no end is a single minute, and a dentist appointment will be booked on top of it.
• The venue name and full address in the location field, not buried in the notes. That is the field a calendar hands to a maps app on the morning.
• Something that tells a guest abroad which time zone the hours are in.

The entry our invitations build fills most of that from what you have already typed into the editor: your names, the event name, the start time, and the venue with its address. There is no end time to fill in anywhere, so every entry runs a fixed block of a few hours from the start. That is enough to stop a calendar treating your wedding as a single minute, and a guest who wants the whole day held can stretch the entry once it is sitting in their own calendar.

Several ceremonies, one tap

A poruwa in the morning and a reception in the evening are two entries. A homecoming the following weekend is a third. Asking a guest to add three by hand is asking for one to be missed, usually the one at the far end of the week.

On most of our designs, when your invitation carries more than one dated event, the tap adds all of them at once, through a calendar file that Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook all read. Each entry carries your names in front of the event name, so three entries in a guest’s week read as yours rather than as three unfamiliar words. A few designs hand over the main event only, so open your own preview, tap the button yourself, and count what lands before you send.

One thing to check before you send. An event with no date set does not go into the calendar, because there is nothing honest to write into it. If part of your running order is still to be confirmed, it will be on the invitation and absent from their calendar until you fill the date in.

The cousin who has to fly in

The time on your invitation is the venue’s wall clock. Four in the afternoon means four where you are standing, not four where your cousin is sitting. Calendars are where that goes wrong, because a calendar app will happily shift a time into the reader’s own zone without mentioning it.

Entries are built so an overseas guest lands on the right moment rather than a converted one, and where the entry shows the venue’s local time it names the time zone in the notes. It is still worth a line in your own message to anyone travelling. A guest booking a flight is doing arithmetic with your date.

When the calendar tap is not the answer

Some of your guests will never use it, and it is better to plan for that than be surprised by it. The aunt who keeps a paper diary on the kitchen wall is not going to tap anything. Ring her, and ask her to write the date on the wall while you are still on the phone. The same goes for the relative who reads the invitation over someone else’s shoulder at a family lunch.

The tap also comes after the opening. A guest who has not opened their link has not seen the button at all, and that is a guest list problem rather than a calendar one. The dashboard shows who has opened theirs, which tells you who needs the phone call. If much of your list does not keep a digital calendar, spend the effort on calls and a few printed cards instead.

The button is optional, too. It is switched on when you start, and a toggle in the editor hides it if you would rather the page stayed quieter. A few of our designs do not carry it at all, and on those the toggle is simply not there, so check for the button in your preview if the tap is something you are counting on.

And if the date is not settled, do not send yet. A hundred calendars holding a date you are about to change is worse than none holding anything.

Related: All invitation features