Party planning under neoliberalism
13 ways of looking at a party invite
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HK: Dear Randa…Something both beautiful and crazy happened the other day…
I was invited to two different parties with identical “I have got to get sluttier” memetic jokes as the cover photo. I feel of course filled with gratitude to be invited to two events, and that people in my extended sphere seem to also be struggling with the subconscious desire to Be More Ran Through…
Most prescient to our newsletter though…it got me thinking about PARTIFUL.
You, Randa, were actually the first person I ever saw use partiful to host the now legendary first hot singles party. How about this…one of those redacted senders of the above partifuls actually made out with someone at the party and now they are BF GF. Perhaps it was all about the hot singles we met along the way…….
BUT, Partiful is just the most recent tool in a long a long lineage of digital services we’ve wielded throughout our lives to gather people together. It strikes me that maybe the only thing the advent of social media has unambiguously helped with is ones ability to throw rippers with between 10 and 90 people at them.
So what I want to do here is I am going to give a brief timeline of the modalities, and I’d like us to rank them.
1 Physical Card
Years of Prominence: 1440 - 2005
Notes: i mean totally classic.
2 Seed texts aka “put the word out”
Years of Prominence: 1999 - Present
3 Facebook Event
Years of Prominence: 2009 - 2015
Notes: Obama
4 The digital Flyer
Years of Prominence: 2016 - Present
5 Partiful
Years of Prominence: 2022 - Present
Honorable Mentions:
-The Close Friends Story Summon
-create a GC
Ok So Randa….I gave them to you in order of when they debuted…but whats your ranking?
RS: Using the same flyer seemed suspicious so I went into Partiful’s new mobile app to create an event – lo and BEHOLD:
so these party planners probably just picked the same trending flyer, which to me is unremarkable.
the ranking part of my brain isn’t really working today so i’m just gonna talk about all this stuff if that’s ok with you.
inviting people to parties is an art. it’s a form of self-expression and it’s also your first touchpoint as a host. your opportunity to make people feel whatever you want them to feel. i thought about this stuff a lot with hot singles. this was one of my favorites flyers:
when hosting singles parties (and in my opinion, all parties) it’s important to make an appeal to levity and humor and Taste so that’s what i did with every invite. it needed to be cool… so i did design flips and puns (ok maybe puns aren’t cool)
as a host, you need to choose whatever medium helps express your intention the most. but you can’t make a group chat. i hate that shit. don’t put me in a group chat of 20 people. i’m muting it immediately. bad user experience.
also i don’t get why people still send physical cards for their weddings. i guess it’s cool but also seems like way more trouble than it’s worth unless it’s a particularly beautiful card i want to put on my fridge.
partiful is fb events-coded it’s basically the same. we just don’t use facebook anymore. and you get text updates but i actually don’t think it’s that special that they do SMS despite what our VC donors might think. i like using it because it’s easy the same way fb events was easy.
Also i don’t think you mentioned a simple email. i love email event invites. just like send a bcc email to your friends and ask for a reply to rsvp. chefs kiss. but im obv kind of a freak for email…
HK: OK someone clearly missed the memo that media is returning to obama era desktop homepage supremacy and listicles….I’ve got mouths to feed!!
FACEBOOK - Randa facebook is SO different than partiful. The public wall, the post party album drop…the ability to not just see whos going, but STALK whos going in a matter of clicks. Nothing will be better than this
Partiful - sometimes frictionless totally integrated ux is good
FLYER (Text) - Its good to make stuff or a quasiprivate audience. Dean Kissick wrote thoughtfully about the quasi-private space. “ Now our identities reside in our communities, and in the conversations we have with our friends, where we can express ourselves more candidly to an audience that sort of understands.” Theres a third option between making stuff for everyone and not making anything, and its making weird fucked up party flyers for your friends.
FLYER (email) Same reasoning, I just dont have a critical mass of hot girls email addresses
Cards - I like cards! I think sometimes weddings do have to many invitation steps though. Also…a card that goes to a website? Not for me!
GC - dogshit..don’t even have a party
Now, speaking on the i need to get sluttier meme…perhaps the specific meme is just an example of two people in my extended orbit having good taste (wow shocker…..…not!) but you gotta remember, they had to search for the word sluttier. Theres something in the water….
Lastly…FOTS Sophie Haigney recently did something in this space that I want to highlight. She sent out a close friends story saying something like “come to this bar at 9pm and i’ll be there”. I’d never seen anythign like that but I instantly saw the vision. Not quite a party, but certainly an invite…and what else is the close friends section of your ig if not a group of people you’d be pumped to run into at a bar…
RS: Ok – let me edit my partiful / fb event opinion – partiful is TRYING to be FB events. there is a semi-public wall (you have to RSVP “maybe” to see it), you can add photos to the event, and you can stalk who’s going if they link to their socials on their partiful profile. i’m with you - the golden age is over… partiful is sort of the conceptually barbaric bronze age successor to fb events…
HK:
Classic work again