The WhatsApp send, one tap per guest

There is no button that sends your invitation to two hundred people at once, and you should know that before you sit down to do it. The send opens one WhatsApp chat per guest, with your message and that guest’s own link already written into the box. You press send. One tap each, two hundred times. The evening goes on the tapping, not on hunting down the right link for the right name, pasting it in and checking nobody has been handed somebody else’s.

What happens when you tap send on a row

Each guest has a row, and each row has a send button. Tap it and three things happen. The guest’s personal link is generated if it does not exist yet. Your message template is filled in for that guest, so their name, their events and their link are in it. Then WhatsApp opens on a chat with that one person, the message sitting in the box, waiting for you.

Nothing has been sent at this point. You read it, add a line for that particular person if you want to, and press send yourself. It goes from your own WhatsApp number, so it arrives looking like a message from you rather than from a service.

Back on your guest list, that row is now marked as sent. You did not have to tick anything, and that mark is what lets you close the laptop halfway through and find your place again tomorrow.

Why it cannot be one button for the whole list

Because every message is different. Amara gets her name and her link. Your father’s cousin gets his name, his link, and only the ceremonies he is invited to. One identical message with one shared link cannot do any of that, and the invitation would open with no name on it for anybody.

So this is not a broadcast, a bulk send or a mass message, and we would rather say so plainly than let you discover it at nine on a Sunday night. A personal link per guest and a single tap for the whole list are two things you cannot have together.

The trade is straightforward. You spend the taps. In exchange, every reply comes back already attached to a name, so you are not squinting at a group chat on a Tuesday evening working out which Perera said yes while the caterer waits for final numbers.

Write the message once, before you start

Write your message before the first send, not during it. You compose it once, and tokens stand in for the parts that change from guest to guest: the guest name, your two names, the events that guest is invited to, the links themselves, and a schedule line giving each ceremony with its time and place.

Preview it against a real guest before you begin. A message that reads well in your head can arrive with a stray blank line, or an event list that makes no sense for someone invited to one thing. Fixing that after forty sends means forty people have the wrong version. Keep it short. The invitation carries the detail.

Plan the run in sittings

Treat this like addressing envelopes, because that is the job it replaced. Thirty to forty guests in a sitting is a working figure we suggest, not one we have measured, and the useful part of it is the stopping rather than the number. A tired run is where somebody gets sent the wrong thing. Replies start arriving while you are still working down the list, and answering them mid-send is how you lose your place.

• Start with the people who reply quickly. Their answers tell you whether the invitation reads properly before it goes to everyone else.
• Send the difficult numbers when you are fresh. The household where you are not sure which of the two reads their messages takes a decision, not a tap.
• Leave the elderly relatives for a sitting of their own. Several will want a phone call, not a link.

Work in filtered groups so the list keeps your place

Do not work down two hundred rows in one flat list. Filter it, send that group, then filter the next. The list narrows by side of the family, by group, by which event a guest is invited to, and by whether they have been sent theirs yet.

• Filter to one side of the family and each sitting is a coherent set of people, which makes it obvious when one of them is missing.
• Filter by event when the poruwa list and the reception list are not the same people. Colleagues invited to the reception alone come up as one batch, and the message they get names that ceremony and nothing else.
• Filter to not sent when you come back. That is the whole trick. The list shrinks as you work, and the last screen you see is empty.

Later, once the run is finished, the same row of filters does the chasing. Filter to not opened and you are looking at wrong numbers and people who never saw it. Filter to opened, then to pending, and you have the ones who read it and never answered.

When to send it another way, or not at all

Some guests will not be reached this way. Every row also lets you copy the whole message, or the bare link on its own, so it can go by email, by SMS, or through the one person in a house who answers their phone at all. Opens are counted against the link itself, so the route it took to get there makes no difference. Where a row has no number saved, no send button is offered on it, and copying the link is the only way out of that row.

A few rows you will skip, come back to and skip again, because that person does not tap links in a chat and no rewording will change it. Print a short run of cards for those few and send everybody else theirs from the list. Nobody compares which one they were given.

And if your whole guest list is fifteen people in one family group chat, be honest about whether any of this is worth setting up. Send them all one link and get on with the rest of the wedding. It earns its keep once the list is longer than you can hold in your head, or once the poruwa and the reception have different names against them. If you are still weighing the routes, what invitations cost is the other half of it, and the plans charge once per invitation template rather than by the head.

Related: WhatsApp delivery