Free tool

Ask once,
not one by one.

Asking a hundred and twenty people for their address, one message at a time, is the most tedious job in event planning. This writes the ask instead — for text, for email, and for the reminder afterwards — and gives you the shape of the record to keep the answers in.

How do I collect addresses from guests without chasing everyone individually?

Send one message to your whole list at once, and put three things in it: why you are asking, one place to answer, and a date to answer by. Address the household rather than each person, so one reply covers everyone at that address. A request missing any of the three is the one that gets read and not answered — which is what turns address collection into a month of individual chasing.

Write the ask.

Fill in five fields and you get the text, the email, the reminder for whoever has not answered, and the headings for the sheet you keep the replies in.

Who is askingThe names a guest will recognise

Occasion

What you are sending first

Reply byTwo weeks is usually enough for a first ask

Where they answerOptional. Paste your own form link, or leave it empty and guests reply to the message itself

Households to askOptional

Nothing you type here leaves your device. No names, no link, no addresses — the page makes no request to any server and stores nothing. What it produces is the message. The collecting and holding of real addresses is deliberately not its job, for the reason set out in section 05.

The four parts of an ask that gets answered.

An address request is a small favour asked of a busy person. Whether it is answered comes down to four things, and most requests are missing at least two of them.

A reason. “We are sending save-the-dates next month and want to make sure yours reaches you” is warm and explains itself. An unexplained request for someone's home address is the version that gets left unread — it reads as admin at best.
One place to answer. Either a link, or the message itself. Not both, and never “let me know”. If the guest has to decide where to put the answer, it arrives late, or in a channel you will lose it in, or not at all.
A date. Not because you need it that day, but because a request without one is filed rather than answered. It also gives you something to say in the reminder that is not simply the first message again.
Permission to answer once for the household. Say it in the message. Without it, either four people at one address each send you the same address, or — much worse, and much more common — each of them assumes somebody else already has.

Which channel, and what each one costs you.

There is no best one. There is a trade between how fast the answers come and what state they arrive in, and it is worth choosing deliberately rather than by habit.

Channel	Use it when	What it costs you
Text or WhatsApp	You have the numbers and want answers today	The fastest replies by a distance — and the worst format. Every answer arrives as free text in a thread, and you transcribe all of them by hand.
Email	You have a list, or the ask is going to a large number of households	Slower to be opened, but the reply is already written down, searchable, and still there in three months when you need it again.
A link, in either	Any list where you would otherwise be retyping answers	You have to make the form, and it must show each guest only their own entry. Everything after that is easier.
Asking a relative instead of the guest	Older guests, and the last handful who never reply	Nothing, and it is reliably the fastest route to the final few addresses. Somebody in the family has them written down.
A shared editable spreadsheet	Never	Every guest can read every other guest's home address. It happens constantly, because it is the easiest thing in the world to set up.

Why your one text message may send as three.

An SMS is not measured in characters exactly. It is measured in a restricted alphabet — roughly ASCII, plus a short list of accented letters — and it carries 160 of them. The moment a single character falls outside that alphabet, the entire message re-encodes and the limit drops to 70. Once a message is long enough to be split, each part loses a few more characters to its own header.

So the length of your ask can be decided by one letter. “Sofia” is inside the alphabet and “Sofía” is not; a curly apostrophe inserted automatically by your phone is not; an em dash is not. Any one of them can turn a one-message request into three, which is why the messages this tool writes use straight apostrophes and no dashes, and why the counter above tells you which alphabet yours ended up in.

None of this applies to WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage between Apple devices, or email — all of them carry the full character set and have no practical length limit. It matters only for a plain SMS, which is still how a good number of guests will receive whatever you send.

The tracking sheet, and what each column is for.

Thirteen columns. The tool gives you them as a tab-separated line, which pastes into a spreadsheet as headings. The last two are the ones people leave out and then wish they had.

Column	Why it is there
Household	The line the invitation is addressed to. One row per envelope, never one row per person — otherwise your row count and your print count can never be reconciled.
Names as they should be written	This is what actually gets printed or written out. It is not what is stored in your phone, and it is not always what they are called.
People invited at this address	Catches the children you did not know about, and gives you the seated headcount for free.
Address lines, city, region, postcode	Separate columns, always. One free-text box produces addresses that cannot be printed onto an envelope without hand-editing every single one.
Country	The field people skip, and the one that returns international post.
Email or phone	How you asked, and how you will chase. It is also your reply channel later, so recording it now saves a second round of asking.
Asked on	Without a date you cannot tell who is overdue, and the chase becomes memory rather than a list.
State	Not asked / asked / partial / confirmed / undeliverable. Partial is the state people omit and the commonest one in practice: an address with no postcode is not an address, but it looks like one in a spreadsheet.
Checked	One deliberate pass over the whole list before anything is made. Correcting twelve addresses on screen costs minutes; correcting them afterwards costs a reprint.

Keep the sheet somewhere only you can open it. It is a list of where your guests live.

Why this tool does not collect the addresses.

A list of where a hundred and twenty named people live is the most sensitive thing an event produces. A free public tool that stored one would be taking on real obligations — to secure it, to hand it back, to delete it on request, to say who else can see it — and a tool that does not state plainly how it meets them should not be trusted with the list in the first place.

So this one collects nothing at all. Everything you typed above stayed in the browser tab: there is no request to any server on this page, nothing is stored, and closing the tab is the entire deletion process. You can confirm it by disconnecting from the network and using the tool, which behaves identically.

What is left is the part a public page can honestly do — write the ask, and give you the shape of the record. The collecting is the part Evorrah's guest platform does, and it does it the way section 02 recommends: each guest opens a private link of their own and fills in their own address, in separate lines with the country as its own field, in their own language, and confirms who else at that address is invited. The answers arrive as a structured guest list rather than as a hundred and twenty text messages somebody has to retype.

Whatever link you paste into the message, open it once as a guest would. The failure is almost never the wording; it is a form that shows the reader everybody else's entries, or asks for the address in one box, or has no country field. Any of those undoes the whole exercise, and you will not notice until the addresses come back unusable.

Common questions

Is anything I type here sent anywhere?

No. The tool is a script running in your own browser. There is no upload, no account, no email gate and nothing stored — not the names, not your link, not the message it wrote. Disconnect from the network and it works exactly the same.

When should I send this?

Before save-the-dates, which for a wedding is usually six to eight months ahead. If you are already past that point, send it now rather than waiting for invitations — invitation week is the busiest moment of the whole stationery timeline and the worst time to discover forty addresses are missing.

How many times should I chase?

Twice. A reminder to everyone who has not answered, about a week after the first ask; then an individual message to whoever is still missing a week after that. Past that point, stop asking the guest and ask a relative — for older guests especially, someone in the family has the address written down.

Should I ask for the address and the RSVP together?

No, and they are months apart for a reason. You need the address before anything can be posted; you need the reply after the invitation has arrived. Combining them means either asking for the address far too late, or asking someone to reply to an event they have not yet been invited to.

What about guests I only have a first name for?

Ask whoever added them to the list, not the guest. Someone you cannot name in full is someone you cannot address an envelope to, and that gap is far easier to close now than in the week the invitations are being made.

Can I change the wording?

Yes — it is text in a box, and it is meant to be edited. Keep the four parts in section 01 and the rest is yours. If you rewrite the text version, watch the character counter: see section 03 for why an em dash can cost you two extra messages.

The replies have to land somewhere.

This page writes the ask. Evorrah's guest platform takes the answers — each guest opens their own private link, gives their own address, and confirms who else is at it — then keeps that list across the whole event, and the next one. It is included in the commission rather than sold as a subscription.

See how the guest list works The full guidance

The guidanceHow to collect guest addresses Structure the listOrganising a guest list by household Then count itGuest list organiser All of themFree tools