How to use Google Docs to create an online wedding RSVP tool #Invitation DIY#apps#rsvp#web tools September 3 2015 | Guest post by Sarah Brewer By: dullhunk – CC BY 2.0 Many wedding website or paperless invitation services offer a built-in RSVP tool, which is fabulous. However, if you’re looking for a free DIY option, look no further than the much-lauded Google Docs. Google Docs offers a very easy and efficient way of creating an online RSVP tool using Google Forms. Start by clicking “New” in your Google Drive Yes, you need a Google Drive for this. But don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of use out of it. Select “Google Forms.” From there, the interface is very simple… Choose a title for your form, like “RSVP for our wedding” Then you can change the format of each question to text, paragraph text (longer), multiple choice, check-boxes, choose from drop-down list, scale, grid, date and time. You can also edit the questions later if you don’t like how it looks. A very simple sample RSVP could be: Notice that, under “Confirmation Page,” you can edit the confirmation message and choose to allow your guests to edit their responses. Be sure that “Publish and show a public link to form results” is unchecked, otherwise anyone can respond to your RSVP. You can click “Change theme” at the top to change how the form appears You can even get really fancy and click “Customize” to change the colors, header image, background, fonts, etc. This is the one I used: Once you’re done, hit “Send form” You can embed the form in your wedsite Related Post What to do when an uninvited guest RSVPs for the wedding you didn't invite them to attend So, we've talked about How to tell your guests they don't get a +1. We've gone over 10 blunt-but-loving ways to tell people they're not... Read more We have a page called “RSVP,” but you could also just include a short url on a paper invite or send this with your e-vite. You could even turn the URL for your form into a QR code and print that on your invites. Note: You might want to ask your guests not to share the link to your form with anyone else. Otherwise you may have to deal with RSVPs from uninvited guests. You can choose to store responses in a separate Google Sheets spreadsheet or within the form itself If you’re planning on using this information to create other reports, it may be best to create a new spreadsheet. However, if you keep them in the form, you still have the option of downloading a .csv file of the responses. Click the “View responses” button to access these options: You can view this sample RSVP form here: Sample RSVP Form Step-by-step instructions are here: Creating a Wedding RSVP form Mad how-to skills: Using Google Spaces for wedding planning We love us some Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) for wedding planning. You can create spreadsheets, shareable documents, and all kinds of helpful databases for your wedding planning team to… Read More Reporter Name * Reporter Email * Original text Enter the original text here. Edited text* Enter your suggested copyedit here. Notes You can add a note for the editor here. * Required information. Fix Typo Guest post written by Sarah Brewer Sarah is a proud Pacific Northwest native (go Hawks!) and spends her days as a Customer Service professional and the rest of her time snuggling with her fiancée and their fur-babies while dreaming up the magic words that will change the world. http://sarahandholly.wordpress.com PREVIOUS Encourage spontaneous wedding singing as you walk down the aisle NEXT How to donate your wedding flowers to hospitals, shelters, or the elderly Show/Hide comments [ 14 ] Ughhhh this is so smart. My fiance and I are both software engineers so we built our wedding website, including the RSVP functionality and back end (PHP, security features, database, the works from scratch). It took 13 man-and-woman-hours to get the RSVP working. We should have just done this. Reply This is genius! I love google.. Great tip! Reply There is also a google docs template called "wedding planning" with pretty much everything you could ask for. Reply Yass! This and the OBB tribe checklist were my saving grace when I first started the planning process and had no idea where to begin. I did find that that templates required a lot of customization as our wedding planning needs are a bit less "standard" but I do love having our guest list, vendor contact list, budget, and music list all in one place. Reply We used this for our wedding and it worked really well! We also had some people invited to a dinner the night before and brunch the next day (this was all our out-of-town guests, mostly family) and some who weren't (most of our local guests, mostly friends). In order to only have 1 RSVP and not accidentally 'invite' people to these events via RSVP form we used multiple pages in the form. Page 1 is a 'choose from list' question with our alphabetized guest list. -Check the 'go to page based on answer' box. -For guests invited to dinner, brunch and wedding choose 'Continue to next page' -For guests just invited to the wedding choose 'Go to page 3' Page 2 is the RSVP questions for dinner and brunch. Page 3 is the RSVP for the wedding. Reply Very awesome ideas! Reply We just used this for our wedding (happening in one month). Works perfectly. We created a custom bit.ly link with our last name and just included that on the invitation. On the RSVP page, we also included links to the hotels where we'd reserved blocks of room and details about parking for the day of the wedding. Now, if Google could develop a way to ACTUALLY GET PEOPLE TO RSVP ON TIME, I would give them all of my money 🙂 Reply I did this used the same form template look too. I sent my invites using MailChimp so I was able to nudge anyone who didn't RSVP/open the invite. Although I did learn that MailChimp, although free, many email platforms (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) mark it as spam or a promo and file it away where people may not see it. But the Google doc worked really well and I even used the form to ask people for their addresses which made it very easy to send thank you notes after. Reply We used this to gather contact info as well. We got about a 45% response, which is about what we expected given the demographic of our guest list. Works like a charm. Reply Oooh! We totally did this! You can ALSO use RegEx (Regular Expressions) to sort of password protect the form! I say sort of, because it's not truly secure. Anyone who knows anything about code and regular expressions can view the source code and figure out what the password is, but it's mainly just to deter casual drive-bys, as it were. Helpful tutorial here: http://www.swaip.com/node/459233 Reply I never thought of this! Like I said, we embedded ours on a page on our wedsite and then just password protected the page. We are also probably going to be sharing the page via email/social media depending on how many people actually RSVP initially. But since we’re not totally concerned about the safety we don’t mind just making the link “unpublished” and passing it around that way. Reply Yeah, I think doing the "unpublished" thing though depends on what CMS you're using. Like, for example, if you're using WordPress or Drupal, then making a page "unpublished" will serve a 403 to anyone who isn't logged in. We used mywedding.com to do our site (although I think if we were going to do it again, I'd use WordPress because of better customization), so there was a lot we were limited by. MyWedding allows you to password protect your whole site, but we wanted the informational bits to be readily accessible to our guests. MyWedding also actually has an RSVP feature, but it wasn't customizable at all, and we needed something much more robust, so we went the Google form route. It was a pain getting them to embed properly too; I think I ended up using an iframe, which isn't really ideal… Anyway, basically we just needed a password protected form, so I did some research and came across this idea, and it worked great! 🙂 Reply How would a person be able to limit the number of guests per invite using this method? Reply Thanks for this idea! I started to use php form option but figured there had to be a better/easier way to do this. 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Ughhhh this is so smart. My fiance and I are both software engineers so we built our wedding website, including the RSVP functionality and back end (PHP, security features, database, the works from scratch). It took 13 man-and-woman-hours to get the RSVP working. We should have just done this. Reply
There is also a google docs template called "wedding planning" with pretty much everything you could ask for. Reply
Yass! This and the OBB tribe checklist were my saving grace when I first started the planning process and had no idea where to begin. I did find that that templates required a lot of customization as our wedding planning needs are a bit less "standard" but I do love having our guest list, vendor contact list, budget, and music list all in one place. Reply
We used this for our wedding and it worked really well! We also had some people invited to a dinner the night before and brunch the next day (this was all our out-of-town guests, mostly family) and some who weren't (most of our local guests, mostly friends). In order to only have 1 RSVP and not accidentally 'invite' people to these events via RSVP form we used multiple pages in the form. Page 1 is a 'choose from list' question with our alphabetized guest list. -Check the 'go to page based on answer' box. -For guests invited to dinner, brunch and wedding choose 'Continue to next page' -For guests just invited to the wedding choose 'Go to page 3' Page 2 is the RSVP questions for dinner and brunch. Page 3 is the RSVP for the wedding. Reply
We just used this for our wedding (happening in one month). Works perfectly. We created a custom bit.ly link with our last name and just included that on the invitation. On the RSVP page, we also included links to the hotels where we'd reserved blocks of room and details about parking for the day of the wedding. Now, if Google could develop a way to ACTUALLY GET PEOPLE TO RSVP ON TIME, I would give them all of my money 🙂 Reply
I did this used the same form template look too. I sent my invites using MailChimp so I was able to nudge anyone who didn't RSVP/open the invite. Although I did learn that MailChimp, although free, many email platforms (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) mark it as spam or a promo and file it away where people may not see it. But the Google doc worked really well and I even used the form to ask people for their addresses which made it very easy to send thank you notes after. Reply
We used this to gather contact info as well. We got about a 45% response, which is about what we expected given the demographic of our guest list. Works like a charm. Reply
Oooh! We totally did this! You can ALSO use RegEx (Regular Expressions) to sort of password protect the form! I say sort of, because it's not truly secure. Anyone who knows anything about code and regular expressions can view the source code and figure out what the password is, but it's mainly just to deter casual drive-bys, as it were. Helpful tutorial here: http://www.swaip.com/node/459233 Reply
I never thought of this! Like I said, we embedded ours on a page on our wedsite and then just password protected the page. We are also probably going to be sharing the page via email/social media depending on how many people actually RSVP initially. But since we’re not totally concerned about the safety we don’t mind just making the link “unpublished” and passing it around that way. Reply
Yeah, I think doing the "unpublished" thing though depends on what CMS you're using. Like, for example, if you're using WordPress or Drupal, then making a page "unpublished" will serve a 403 to anyone who isn't logged in. We used mywedding.com to do our site (although I think if we were going to do it again, I'd use WordPress because of better customization), so there was a lot we were limited by. MyWedding allows you to password protect your whole site, but we wanted the informational bits to be readily accessible to our guests. MyWedding also actually has an RSVP feature, but it wasn't customizable at all, and we needed something much more robust, so we went the Google form route. It was a pain getting them to embed properly too; I think I ended up using an iframe, which isn't really ideal… Anyway, basically we just needed a password protected form, so I did some research and came across this idea, and it worked great! 🙂 Reply
Thanks for this idea! I started to use php form option but figured there had to be a better/easier way to do this. Reply