Every question you add to your RSVP is a small tax on your reply rate. A guest who would have tapped yes in one motion now has to stop and think about whether they eat meat, so ask only the questions whose answers change a decision you have to make. You can add up to ten of your own, in four types: free text, yes or no, pick one, and pick any. Adding the first one also replaces your design’s built-in reply form with the shared one, which is worth looking at before you send anything.
Which questions earn their place
A question earns its place if you can name the decision it settles and the person waiting on it. Write that person down before you write the question. Usually it is the caterer, whoever is booking the bus, or whoever is making the playlist.
- Dietary preference. Settles how the kitchen splits the covers. Ask it as pick one, with the options your caterer actually offers.
- Food allergies. Settles what has to stay out of a dish. This one wants words rather than a tick.
- Transport. Settles how many seats you book and whether one van will do. Yes or no is enough.
- A song. Settles nothing, and is the one indulgence worth keeping: people enjoy answering it and the playlist improves.
Those four come as presets, so you start from wording rather than a blank field. Accommodation is the sensible fifth if your guests are travelling and you are holding rooms.
The questions that quietly produce noise
Everything else is mostly noise, and noise is expensive, because it sits between a guest and the reply you actually wanted.
- “Anything else we should know?” You will get jokes, blessings, and one genuinely important thing buried among two hundred sentences.
- Anything you have no intention of acting on. If the bar is fixed, do not ask people what they drink.
- Plus-one negotiation. A question that invites guests to propose extra people will get you extra people. Seats are something you set, not something you ask about.
Free text reads beautifully and counts badly
The type you choose is not a formatting decision. It decides whether you end up with a number or a paragraph.
Free text at two hundred guests is two hundred sentences, and they come back in every shape a sentence can take. “None”, “no”, “not really” and “shellfish I think?” are four ways of saying two things, and none of them add up to a number you can hand to anybody. Use free text where the answer has to be specific and only a handful of people will write one. Allergies are the clearest case.
Pick one is countable. Because everyone chose from the same short list, the answers come back as a count for each option, with the number of heads behind it once party sizes are added up. That is a line you can read down the phone. Yes or no is the same idea tightened to two answers, and it is the right shape for transport.
Pick any is for questions where more than one answer can be true. It counts the same way, though a guest ticking three boxes lands in three totals, so read those as ticks rather than people.
A pick-one or pick-any question needs at least two options, and every guest has to find themselves in the list. In practice that means a plain “no restrictions” as well as an “other”. A guest who cannot will either pick the nearest wrong thing or give up on the form.
Wording that gets you an answer you can use
Ask one thing per question. “Any allergies or dietary requirements?” is two questions wearing one coat, and the answers come back tangled together. Say who is waiting on it as well: a question that mentions the kitchen gets a more careful reply than a bare one.
Remember that the answer belongs to the guest, not to a ceremony. Each guest is asked once and their answer stays with them across the whole day, which is right for allergies and wrong for anything that changes between the morning and the evening. If a household of four has one vegetarian in it, free text is the only way you will find out which one.
Mark a question required only when you cannot proceed without it. Required applies to the people who are coming: someone accepting has to answer before they can submit, and someone declining is not held up by a question about dinner.
Settle the type before you send. Once answers have arrived, a question’s type is fixed, because what is already stored is the wrong shape for the new one. Rewording is fine. Turning free text into pick one after fifty people have written sentences is not.
What the answers look like coming back
You get two views of the same thing, alongside the rest of your replies. Per question, a count for each option with the heads behind it, which is what a caterer wants. Under that, a table of who answered what, which is what you want at eleven at night when you cannot remember whether it was Nuwan or his brother who cannot eat prawns. Free text is simply listed with the name attached, since there is nothing to total.
Guests who replied through the public link and are still waiting for your approval stay out of the counts, so a stranger cannot move your vegetarian number. They still appear in the table, marked.
If a question stops being useful, hiding it takes it off the form and keeps every answer already given. Deleting it takes those answers with it. Hide first.
When to skip the questions entirely
If your list is forty people you have known for years, do not build a form. Ring the three you are unsure about and write it on the seating plan. Questions earn their keep once the exceptions outnumber the ones you can recite from memory, or once the cooking has been handed to somebody who needs it all in writing.
Ask your caterer and your venue what they actually need before you write a single question, then work backwards from their list. Often it is a split by main course and nothing else, in which case one pick-one question does the whole job and the other nine slots stay empty. That is a good outcome, not a wasted allowance.
And if you have already collected all of this in a family group chat or a spreadsheet, do not ask again. People notice being asked twice, and the second answer is usually worse than the first.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions should I actually ask?
Three or four is the working answer we would give you, not something anyone has measured. Ten is the ceiling, not a target. Every question sits between a guest and the yes you were hoping for, so add the fourth only if you can name what it decides.
Can I ask a different question for each ceremony?
No. A question belongs to the invitation, and each guest answers it once, with the answer attached to them rather than to an event. Word it to cover the whole day, and if something genuinely differs between the morning and the evening, say so inside the question.
What happens to the answers if I remove a question?
Deleting a question deletes the answers given to it. If you only want it off the form, hide it instead: it disappears for guests and everything already collected stays where it is.
Related: How replies arrive