For hosts of parties with mixed crowds
There is no single best channel — there is a best channel per guest. Group chat, email, card, or a link that counts replies: which fits whom, and how to mix them without counting anyone twice.
Anyone hosting for a mixed crowd — family and friends and colleagues inside one headcount — quickly learns that the list is not one audience. The cousins live in the family group; the work friends organise through email; university people answer in chat at hours that would appal their office counterparts. Picking one channel means picking a favourite half of your guests and hoping the other half hears anyway.
So the useful question is not what is the best way to send, but who is the best way to send to each person.
The default placements, adjusting for your own crowd:
An individual message, written for them, ideally close to what you would have said face to face. These guests should never receive a broadcast, whatever app you use.
The chat itself is honest and efficient — everyone already plans there. One clear message with the details, and a request to answer somewhere other than the chat so it does not drown in the noise.
Email if that is the shape of the relationship, chat if you genuinely swap messages there. Where the two overlap, pick one road per colleague and leave the other alone.
A message or call through the family member they actually answer to, with the invitation page's link to hand — or a card, if the occasion wants one.
The link. Time zones and postal services aside, it is the one road that runs everywhere, and the reply works while they sleep.
Here is a mixed-channel party when every reply stays in its own channel: a chat full of yeses that scroll away, an inbox with three replies and one unanswered question, a mother-in-law who heard second-hand and assumes she was forgotten. By the week before, you are re-reading group history to rebuild a list, double-counting the couple who answered in two places, and chasing people who answered honestly the first time.
The channel is not the problem. The scattering is.
Put the party on a page — timing, place, what to bring, an RSVP button with a deadline — and every channel above becomes simply a road to the same destination. The email and the message carry identical truth; whoever answers, answers in one place. The live list becomes the single ledger: plus-ones recorded inside limits you set, meal choices attached to names, arrivals scannable at the door through QR check-in. Mixing channels stops being risky because replies stopped depending on the channel. That is a structural fix, not luck.
Which channel is answered fastest matters less than when you send:
How it works
Start free and shape the party — timings, address, what to expect, a reply button taking meal choices. Clara helps with the wording if the casual tone takes two tries to land.
Walk the list and mark each name with how they will hear it: individual message, group chat, email, or the relative's designated relay. Jitabi can draft the different versions.
Same link every time; only the covering line changes. One group post counts as the send for the whole casual circle.
Watch replies land from every channel into one place, and near the deadline let a reminder reach only the names still unanswered.
Questions
To different guests, yes — that is the guest-by-guest idea. To the same guest, no: pick the channel they actually read. Two arrivals of one invitation invite two replies, and reconciling them is exactly the busywork the page was meant to end.
Long enough before that people can honestly say yes, which for anything casual means roughly three weeks. A date sent four months out gets answered optimistically and forgotten twice. Put the reply deadline on the page and send when the plan is real.
There is no app to install — the link opens in whatever browser they already have, and the RSVP button takes a name and an answer. No sign-up wall between a yes in the chat and a yes on the list.
Set the rule once on the page: plus-ones only inside the limits you choose. Then a guest arriving through email, chat or a forwarded link meets the same boundary, and you never have to be the one saying no in a conversation.
Not properly. The chat yes is a warm signal, but it is not on the list, and chats forget. Reply to them there, thank them, and ask once for a tap on the page. The deadline reminder will reach them too, since on the list they are not.
Get Started
Match the channel to the person and the replies all land in one list anyway. Start free, send guest by guest, and count the party from a single page.
