Everything comes by experience. Some details come by enquiries. Whichever way you look at it, there are still mistakes bound to happen and this blog post is a ready reckoner for those who would love to organize parties for their loved ones calling all near and dear. Particularly this post reflects on a recent birthday party I had for my son. Some important experiences I underwent while organizing this party has made me to pen them down here so that people organizing similar events would get a clue as to how to go about.
Invitation process:
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I first wrote down a list of main invitees
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I then counted how many people are totally there in each of the invitees families, which gave me a total invitee count
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I logged into www.evite.com one of the well known invitation sites and added the main invitees and prepared a detailed invitation.
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I presented/mailed the invite to everyone I added so that step one was done.
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The total invitee list stood at a little over 200 (including family members)
Getting the people to respond:
This is no doubt the worst part of all, but then the organizers have to understand that the stakes of a birthday party are high. The main costs involved in organizing the party today is that of FOOD. Hotel’s charge per head and its generally about Rs.120 upto Rs.250 or even Rs.300 for some high end resort style hotels. So even for a meagre 100 people, this works out to Rs.12000/- bucks just for good. To add the icing to the cake, the hotel charges separately for the party hall in case your guests are less than a hundred. So basically this high cost covers only the FOOD and/or the party hall itself. Absolutely nothing else.
Always plan an event in advance. This will give you enough time for you to go behind people for their responses on their availability. This may mean calling them until they respond or even daily birthday reminders by email, but so be it. It is important that we learn to estimate almost exactly on how much food is needed to be served.
