RSVP-ing

It’s RSVP Time!

Lizzie and I are getting married in May and the invitations are finally going out (more on that soon). The invitations are looking great, Kelsey, Brynn, and Lizzie ended up with something cool. Now comes the fun part of hearing who’s able to make it.

Architecture

I’m pretty happy with how the RSVP architecture ended up, the invitation points to our website and a call-to-action there shuffles the reader off to a web form where they give us the RSVP information. This interaction kicks off quite the workflow that’ll allow us to keep track of guest information and keep them updated as we get closer to the event itself.

When building the system, we wanted:

• A web form for users to fill out
• A database that we could put Guest information into
• A web interface to the data that we didn’t have to build
• A mailing list or email platform for contacting guests en masse

We landed on a combination of Airtable and Mailchimp to store our guest data and to keep in track of them. Below is an overview of our workflow:

                                 <Confirmation Email>
Webflow Site ──► Airtable Form  ────────────────┐
                       │                        │
                       ▼                        │
                Airtable RSVP Table             ▼
                       │                     Guest ◄───────┐
                       ▼                        ▲          │
                     Slack ─────────────────────┘          │
                       │           <Confirmation Email>    │
                       │                                   │
            ┌──────────┼────────┐                          │
            │          │        │                          │
            │          │        │                          │
            ▼          │        ▼                          │
Airtable Guest Table   │     Airtable Diet Table           │
                       │                                   │
                       ▼                                   │
                  Mail Chimp  ─────────────────────────────┘
                                     <Event Updates>

That form adds a row to our RSVP airtable database to be processed. At the same time, Airtable fires off a Slack notification to our couple’s Slack workspace. From there, we can click the link to review the information, adjusting anything as needed. Once we’re happy all the info is recorded, we add them to Mailchimp and send a confirmation email.

Also in Airtable are a Guest table, which we’ll use as the primary record for each person attending the wedding, and a Diet table. The Diet table is where we keep the list of things that our guests would die after eating… to avoid them.

Next Steps

Obviously, the next steps are to wait for the RSVPs to come in. But after that we’ll start building out itineraries for folks and adding more and more data to Airtable. Then we’ll give every guest their own unique access code and build a little webpage that - through the magic of the internet - will take their access code and print them a single sheet with all the information they need in one spot. All their activities and times, as well as the schedule of events.