The Guest Handbook
The invitation is
the easy part.
Most of the work of an event is not the design. It is two hundred people, their addresses, their replies, their partners, what they eat and where they sit — and it is the part nobody writes about honestly. So we did.
- Six guides
- Three tools
- No sign-up
01
Why this exists.
There is a great deal written about choosing an invitation and almost nothing useful about the fortnight when a third of your guests have not replied and the caterer needs a number. That imbalance is not an accident — most companies in this category sell paper or registries, and neither business has much reason to write about guest logistics.
Evorrah does, because guest management is half of what we build. These pages are written from that side of the problem, and each one ends with something you can actually do rather than an encouragement to buy something.
02
The guides.
How to get guests to RSVP
The three-reminder method, what to send at each stage, and why every reminder must go to non-repliers only.
Most readNobody is replying — what now?
Triage first: did it arrive, is replying easy, are replies landing somewhere you are not counting.
Organising a guest list by household
Why a guest list is a list of households that happens to contain names, and what that fixes.
How to collect guest addresses
One link instead of two hundred conversations — what to ask for, and the fields that prevent returned post.
Plus-ones: who gets one
A rule you can state in one sentence, wording that removes the ambiguity, and what to do when someone assumes.
Dietary requirements
Allergies and preferences are different problems for a kitchen. How to collect both and give a caterer numbers they can use.
03
The tools.
Free, no account, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
Guest list organiser
Paste your list and see it grouped into households, with duplicates and ambiguous entries flagged.
Free toolHow many invitations do I need?
The number you actually order, counted per household rather than per guest.
Free toolRSVP deadline calculator
Works backwards from your venue's final-numbers date to the date you should print.
Free tool04
The one thing worth knowing early.
If you take a single idea from this handbook, take this: decide now which system holds the truth about who is coming. Not the addresses, not the design — the answer to "who is attending and where are they sitting".
Almost every painful story in event planning is a version of the same failure: replies in an inbox, addresses in a spreadsheet, seating in a document, and a fortnight before the day nobody can reconcile them. One list, from the beginning, prevents nearly all of it.
Stuck on something not covered here? Write to us. We answer guest-list questions whether or not you are a client — and the ones that come up more than once become pages in this handbook.
One list, from the first address to the seating plan.
Every Evorrah commission includes the guest platform — households, per-guest replies, dietary notes, communications and seating, up to 2,000 guests. It is included with the suite, not sold as a subscription.
See the guest platform