No matter how much preparation you put into the big day, you won’t have a party without the people! Writing and sending invitations is a bit of a forgotten art form these days.

With email being so ubiquitous and text messages replacing spoken messages, it’s easy to skip the formalities in exchange for a quick and easy solution and simply text or send a brief email informing parents of the party.

Care and attention

However, take a few moments out of your day to prepare some extra special invitations for you child to send out to his or her friends and you�ll guarantee a much better response. Especially if your party has a specific theme, an invitation can set the appropriate mood for the event days or even weeks in advance. What child doesn�t feel happy about receiving an invitation through the post to their friend�s party?

If you do feel that you are rushed off your feet and really don�t have time to spend on individual personalised invitations, you can instead opt for a couple of different routes, using your home computer and a reasonable quality colour printer.

Electronic invitation

There are many online services which offer you the chance to send out personalised �e-vites� to your party attendees although when doing this, bear in mind the limitations of email. Some people cannot receive emails in the same way as you do. Certain email applications block images from unknown senders, so if you send an invitation in image format, it may not get through.

Also, you cannot guarantee that 100% of your invitations will get through ever more stringent spam filters (it�s highly unlikely, of course, but with things like this, you want to take all necessary steps to make sure the invitation doesn�t get �lost in the post�)

To overcome this, you may just want to send out a simple email to friends who you may want to invite to the party to find out, initially, who may be able to come. This could be viewed as a useful pre-invitation step, to ensure that whoever you are sending invitations to will probably be able to make it. After you receive the appropriate responses, you could then send out more formal invitations through the post, just to give something for the kids to pin up on the wall and look forward to!

Colour Printed Invitations

You will also be able to find a range of party invitation templates on the internet, which you can print out using a reasonably quality colour printer. You can either enter the appropriate text on your home computer, using stylish and attractive fonts, or add the text yourself by hand once you�ve printed the invitations.

Either way, by searching around online, you�ll be able to find many more invitation ideas than you would in the shops, giving your party a much more personalised feel to it.

How to write a party invite

A traditional party invitation has a simple list of details, which include, but are not limited to

• The name of the child who is having the party
• The name of the child to be invited (often phrased as �Child A would like Child B to be at his/her party� )
• The time of the party, best left reasonably flexible to allow for latecomers.
• The day of the party. Very important, for quite obvious reasons!
• The venue for the party. If the party is being held in a location that not many people have directions to, it may be a good idea to insert a simple map in with the invitation or email (for online directions, a service like multimap.com is extremely useful)
• R.S.V.P, although this isn�t always necessary and is more of a formality

Regarding the time of the party, when planning your party, don�t have any group activities planned for, perhaps, the first half hour as there will possibly be latecomers and you don�t want any of the children to feel left out.