Every event in one invitation

A wedding with three events does not need three invitations. A ceremony, a reception and a homecoming can live inside one invitation, each with its own title, date, time and venue, and each guest opens a single link to see the whole run of it. What follows is how to arrange those events so that nobody has to ring your mother to ask what time the reception starts.

Why several events turn into several cards

Most wedding stationery is built around one moment. The trouble is that very few weddings are one moment. A poruwa at eleven in the morning at the bride’s house, a reception at seven in a hotel an hour away, a homecoming the following evening in another town. A church service and a dinner. A mehendi, a nikah and a walima. A registration in one country and the celebration in another. A rehearsal dinner that part of the list is invited to and the rest are not.

On paper you have two bad options. Print three cards, post three cards, and pay for three. Or crush three times and three addresses onto one card in a smaller typeface and hope it reads. Either way the questions arrive by phone in the fortnight before the wedding, and they are always the same questions: which one am I coming to, where is it, and what time do I actually need to be there.

What one invitation can hold

Inside a single invitation you can add several events. Each one carries its own title, its own date and time, its own venue and address, and a short line of description if there is something a guest needs to know. If two events happen at the same place, you keep a list of your venues and pick one per event, so a hall used twice is entered once rather than typed twice with two spellings.

Times are the local clock at your venue. You set the event time zone once, before the dates, and every time you type afterwards is read against it. That is what makes the calendar work: a dated event can be added to a guest’s calendar from the invitation, and a cousin abroad gets it at the correct moment in her own diary rather than at the venue’s hour. Where several events carry dates, one tap takes the whole run of them.

Three things here sound alike and are not the same, and it is worth separating them before you start. Putting several events into one invitation is what this guide is about. Letting guests reply separately to each event is a different setting, and you have to switch it on. Choosing which guest is invited to which event is a third thing again, and it lives with your guest list rather than with your design.

Name each event so nobody has to guess

Guests read the schedule the way they read a train timetable: quickly, once, on a phone, while doing something else. The name of each event is doing more work than you think.

• Say what the event is, not what your family calls it. A name that everyone in your house understands may mean nothing to a colleague.
• Put food in the name when there is food. Guests plan their day around whether dinner is coming.
• Avoid two names that differ by one word. A guest scanning quickly will not notice that one says evening and the other says afternoon.
• Use the description line for the thing you would otherwise be texted about: parking, the gate to use, what to wear, whether children are expected.

Put them in the order the day runs

Order events by when they happen, not by how important they feel. The ceremony may matter most to you, but if the mehendi is two evenings earlier it goes first, because a guest reads down the list and builds a plan as they go. An order that follows the clock answers questions before anyone thinks to ask them.

Mind the gaps. If your ceremony finishes at one and the reception starts at seven, that afternoon is the single thing guests will contact you about, particularly the ones travelling. Write down what happens in it. Usually nothing does, and saying so is the useful part: go back to the hotel, rest, the doors open again at half six. Nobody has measured how long a gap has to be before it needs explaining, so use a working threshold: more than a couple of hours between two events on the same day, and the gap gets its own line.

What guests actually get confused by

Once an invitation carries more than one event, the confusion moves. It stops being about the date and starts being about which parts apply to them. In practice the questions come in this order.

• Am I invited to all of this, or only to one of them?
• Do I reply once, or once for each event?
• Is the second address the same as the first, or somewhere else entirely?
• How many of us are expected at each one?
• What time should I arrive, as opposed to the time printed on the card?

You can answer the first four by how you set the invitation up. The fifth one you have to write down. If you want people seated by half past four, saying so in the description is kinder than printing four o’clock and hoping.

When one invitation is the wrong shape

Sometimes it is. If two events share almost no guests and are hosted by different families, they belong in two invitations: a homecoming the groom’s family runs for their own circle wants their names at the top of it, not a third heading underneath yours. And a private dinner for eight is not a fourth line in a published schedule. Listing it there announces to everybody reading that there is an evening they are not part of, which is a great deal of explaining to take on for the sake of eight people you could ring in an afternoon.

There is also the guest list to be honest about. A longer schedule is a longer scroll, and the guests it loses are the ones who were already handing the phone to somebody younger. Your father’s oldest friend may be coming to all three events and still want a card he can stand on the mantelpiece. If that describes a real slice of your list, print a handful for those guests and keep the link for the rest. Our cost guide goes through that trade in more detail, and you can see what an invitation costs on the pricing page.

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