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The Organized Wedding Consultant Online Help: Working with Responses

Views discussed: Status, Guest Totals, Meal Totals

(Before you work with responses, you should probably understand how to add guests to the invitation list, as described in the help article "Working with the Address Book".)

The place to get started with responses is "Status", under "Responses" in the left-hand menu. This view shows all of the guests who are invited to a particular event, and all of their responses. If you're planning multiple events for the client, there will be a list of events to choose from at the top of the window. If your client has meal choices directly on the response cards, the list of guests can also show their meal choices.

The Green and Blue Bars

The eye-catching blue and green boxes are probably the first things you'll notice on this screen. Look to the left of the boxes, and you'll see a description of how likely each guest is to attend: "Yes (Accepted)", "Almost certain", "Likely", "Fifty-fifty", "Unlikely", "Highly unlikely" or "No (Sent regrets)." The colored boxes are simply a visual way of representing the exact same information. Change the description (by clicking it) to "No (Sent regrets)", and the colored bar changes to one green box. Change the description to "Yes (Accepted)", and the colored bar changes to seven green boxes. Change the description to something in between, and the bar changes to a length in between. The length of the bar, from left to right, simply indicates how likely that guest is to attend. The color of the bar, on the other hand, indicates whether you're sure or only guessing: for "Yes (Accepted)" or "No (Sent regrets)", the bar is green, indicating you're done with that response (you're sure whether they're coming or not). For the levels in between, the bar is blue, indicating that it's only a guess. The advantage of the colored bars is that you can very quickly scan down the list to get a feel for the responses. The other advantage is that instead of choosing from the list of written descriptions (which takes two clicks), you can click directly on the bar to set how far across it should be (which only takes one click).

When you add a new invitation, everyone on the invitation is initially set to "Likely" to attend, which corresponds to a 75% chance of attendance -- the U.S. national average for wedding guests. As a result, the "projected attendance" figures, described in "Guest Totals", below, should be fairly accurate even if you never bother to adjust probabilities for individual guests. If you want to customize the probability for "Likely" to something besides 75%, you can. It's explained at the end of this help article, in "Advanced Statistics".

Meal Choices

If your client's response cards include meal choices, you'll want to tell the program what the choices are before you start entering responses. To set up the choices, click "Set Meal Choices" in the lower-right corner of the "Status" view, and then click the "Add a Meal" button to add the various choices. Keep the names of the meal choices as short as possible -- the names you're filling in aren't menu descriptions for the guests; they're merely brief designations to appear in the list of responses (like "Fish" or "Vegetarian"). When you're done, you can click in the column labeled "Meal Choice" next to each guest, and the software will present you with the list of possible meals to select from.

Counting Children

The "Count as Child" checkbox is unique in that you can use it to mean almost anything you want (or not use it at all). It doesn't have any connection with the title of "Child" that you use in setting up the envelope text, because for invitations, a child is usually anyone under 18, while the age cut-off for children's meals is much younger.

If you're not tracking meal choices, the checkbox is a quick way to keep track of which guests need children's meals. But if you are tracking meal choices, it's better to add an item called "child's meal" to the list of menu options. Then you can use the "Count as Child" checkbox for whatever you want -- to separate out some group, however you want to define them, for whom you want to get a separate attendance count broken out in "Totals" (described below). As an example, we've seen this feature used to count children who are young enough that they'll need nursery facilities.

Guest Totals

The next view in the left-hand menu is "Guest Totals", which gives you as much information about predicted attendance as you could possibly want: not only the number of definite "yes"es and "no"s, but the most likely number of people to show up, total. You can even see things like the range in which attendance is almost certain to fall (95% chance) versus the range in which it is simply likely to fall (75% chance). This area is where those guesses on the "Status" view pay off: they don't affect the number of definite "yes"es and "no"s, but they do affect the predicted total attendance and the ranges in which attendance is predicted to fall. How the software makes these predictions involves a great deal of mathematics, so unfortunately there's no easy way to explain where the numbers come from (other than "yes"es and "no"s, which are just counted up). You can simply think of them as "Predictions based on a computer model". Inherently, the predictions are more accurate for large weddings than they are for small ones, and of course they'll become more and more accurate as your responses come back in.

Meal Totals

The next view below "Guest Totals" (in the left-hand menu) is "Meal Totals", which uses trends in the responses to predict how many meals of each type you're going to need. The predictions for meal totals usually become much more accurate once you've gotten a fair percentage of responses back -- which is a way of warning you that they're highly inaccurate at first, when the software doesn't have much data from which to deduce the trends.

Advanced Statistics (Nobody really needs to understand this -- honest!)

There is one way you can influence how the predictions work: in the lower right corner of all three views under "Responses", there's a button labeled "Set Probability Levels". This button allows you to clarify for the computer exactly what you mean with each of the written descriptions of how likely a guest is to attend. When you say "Likely", do you mean a 70% chance, or an 80% chance? The defaults will produce very reasonable predictions, so you really, really don't have to do anything in this area, but if statistics are your thing, and you know that when you say "Almost certain" you mean 98%, not 95% -- here's your chance to tweak how the predictive modeling works. These adjustments will not have any effect on how the bars are drawn in the "Status" view -- they only affect the statistical analysis that goes into the predictions that appear in the "Guest Totals" and "Meal Totals" views.