Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Digital Digital Get Down

First it pain me using an NSYNC song as a title her, since I'm a Backstreet girl all the way. But it fit with what I was thinking and now that I've thought of it I can't get it out of my head. But now that you realize where my allegiance lies...

With out STD's officially order it was time for me to start tracking down addresses. (What? You don't remember me posting our final STD? That's because it hasn't happened yet. :D) Anyways you could always do the easy way and call people up, or facebook them, or e-mail them. That would get you exactly what you needed. Except you would them have to retype them up again to get them all into a spreadsheet so they'd be easy to use.

Or you could use the other way, and force your guests to do the work. :D Enter google docs... Basically I referenced this post by Ms. Fondue and this post by Mrs. Pashmina. Although honestly it's so easy you could basically do it without instruction. All you're really doing is going to "Forms" to create something resembling this.
I realize that image is ridiculously small, but if you click on it, it will get large enough so you can actually read it. I then went and applied a theme so that way it looked pretty when I e-mailed it out
Although I later realized that even though I made it look pretty people only see if they veiw it out of gmail. It comes to you as a standard looking form within your e-mail, but if you click on the link provided it opens it in a new window where you can see the background.

From there when people enter their information and hit submit, google collects it all in a spreadsheet. I was originally planning on screenshot of the empty spreadsheet as well, but only 2 hours after hitting send I've already had 7 different people respond. Hopefully this pace holds up!

The one catch with this process is that you at least need an e-mail address. I was able to get quite a bit from facebook stalking, but it looks like for the rest might require a phone call or two.

How did you go about collecting mailing address for your invitations? And which side of the Backstreet/NSYNC battle are you on?

4 comments:

  1. That is a really great idea! I hadn't ever thought about how I would go about collecting addresses!

    Right now, I have all of my family/friend's addresses in excel. Or my parents have it in excel, so I think I'd be set once i knew who I wanted to invite... but the WHO part would by far be the hardest part for me!!

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  2. We just called or emailed folks but we had pretty much everyone's address. I love the google forms/docs idea. I've never used the forms but would love to try them.

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  3. I got 90% of my addresses from Facebook! If a family member wasn't on there their sister (or someone who knew their address) was!

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  4. That's a great idea and way to get everyone's address! I usually just have to message a ton of people via facebook. I'm torn.. I like both bands!

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