How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding
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Nobody complained, it took a couple hours to get everything set up the way we wanted it, and within a few days we had around a 90% response rate. Only 1 person RSVPed as no so it doesn't seem like anyone got the impression we didn't care about them
I have a box with all my old handwritten letters from just before the Internet and email exploded. I rarely take it out, but when I do, it's kind of neat to show my niece and nephew.
(I do wonder if all the people who say "collect memories, not things" have more vivid, eidetic memories than I do; mine can be a little fragmentary without help.)
I began doing this when my kids started school and would bring home new art every day. I love that they made a portrait of me by gluing macaroni to a paper plate then covering it in glitter, but I don't necessarily want to become the caretaker of that masterpiece forever.
"That's great Jimmy! Now let me get my camera..."
SNAP!
"There, now we've got that memory forever. Now open the trash can and throw it away!"
I know you don't literally do this, but that's what your comment made me think and it gave me a chuckle. How long do you usually hold on to them?
There was no rigid routine. Things would go in a pile and periodically the pile would go to the recycling bin.
wow - any idea on the conversion rate? if so, how many sigma are you talking here? did you do any a/b testing for future iterations?
With this level of customer focus, it is easy to see why noone complained, which by the way is totally a great metric for measuring ROI.
In the future I would like to run experiments to see how the invite affects gifts received, but I haven't yet convinced my wife to participate in that study.
My wife and I opted to do both physical + digital for our wedding and we found that the older crowd all relied on physical invites and info for things like the schedule, RSVPing, etc, while the younger crowd all used the digital alternative.
To be clear, the older crowd all knows how to use FB etc, and most had smartphones, but many still appreciated having something physical both to remember the wedding (my grandmother keeps the save the date on her fridge 5 years later), and to reference without having to constantly pull out a smart device.
Sure, you could argue that it is your day and you can do what you want, but I look at a wedding as a collective celebration. If it was just my day I wouldn't invite those people. I invited everyone that I wanted to be a part of that celebration with me, so I also put in a little extra effort to help them enjoy the day as much as I did.
Having everything digital also allowed us to send reminders and updates to everyone all at once. For us the tradeoff was absolutely worth it.
I doubt writing all the notes which people send out, of which there are a few batches (invites, RSVP, thanks), could be less than writing this, which isn't much more than sample twilio and a database, and reusing it for each letter "event".
Many weddings in this world also are not just about the bride and groom. They are often family reunions with a wedding on the side as the excuse for lots of people to get together after many, many years.
Weddings are a time for celebration and enjoyment for the bride and groom, as much as guests. Guests often forget that the bride & groom often have no memories of their day as it's a blur.
In addition to printed invitations, I heavily used technology where possible:
- Mailchimp segmented similar to this post was invaluable. - Google Sheet that grew like crazy - My wedding ended up having a ceremony in two cities, double the work and planning - used Asana, worked great. - A little app on Android called Textpansion was fantastic for sending out pre-made snippets of information as needed - addresses, dates, times, locations, updates. All it would take is click on a snippet, paste it into the message, and off I go.
The one thing I couldn't get to?
- Running facial recognition on all the photos that will never see much circulation. Luckily, waiting on this has made it easier.
- organised everything, from guests attendance to guests in tables location, in a huge Gsheets with my wife and a few close relatives.
- did a mobile game for Android and iPhone that was a quiz about me and my wife to be with over 200 questions, that still, 2 years later, people still play at and try to get higher in the leaderboard.
- programmed a Raspberry Pi that showed a slideshow of over 500 pictures of us with our guests since like forever. These pictures were also printed and hanged around the venue for them to find them and take them home.
I also did 10 programmes in 10 different programming languages that printed the food menu (to be used as per table printed menus), but my wife wisely thought it wasn't a good idea.
Weddings are time sinks even small ones like mine, we viewed around 20 venues for example, multiple caterers etc. Anything you can do to save time is a good thing. Handwriting invitations, making 500 paper cranes by hand all are lovely gestures but we focussed on what was important to us - food! For example saved a bunch from ditching traditional wedding invites and table favors (we did have amazing flowers for the tables) that we could then reallocated to having the best food and wine for our guests.
Plus it may sound strange but we don't have all of our friends postal addresses noted down, so mailing out invites would have been even more cumbersome.
I had thought about a phone call out with a prerecorded message to our guests and then collect their input via dtmf ;) But SMS was the easiest method for our needs, but it depends on what networks your guests use I guess.
I've seen many of my friends get married and it can be so expensive (tens of thousands) and for a single day!
We insisted on a good caterer who could actually serve hot food, instead of that limp cold mush that usually ends up out of those serving trays.
It was amazing food and they did an amazing job with it.
And people remember it as one of the great parts of our wedding. Totally worth it.
If I can go to a local BBQ joint, spend $10 on a pulled pork sandwich and baked potato, and feel like I had a 3x tastier meal than the $40+ you spent per plate at the wedding (or whatever crazy number it is nowadays), then I think you screwed up.
And I am not a picky eater at all. There are a lot of people much much pickier than me.
When you try to get super fancy then a lot of people won't care for it, because they don't have the same palates that you do (when you average people out, they collectively have a very boring palate, it seems to me).
It could have been that I wasn't using it right, but I didn't have the time to troubleshoot. We ended up printing a bunch of cards at FedEx and addressing and sending them by hand. Everything worked smoothly.
Better to use an Oh By Code, which doesn't need a reader and can be written/read by humans:
I think what he means is a wedding is a symbolic event that should be mirrored in all the small details, from the hand written card, to the ring, etc, etc... So ya think about it.
Tinder + your calendar app + Opentable
to automate the dating process.
The output of that can be the input of this.
As someone who has attempted to date (not bragging) in what I affectionately call "real life", I am somewhat acquainted with the dangers of both error and alternate paths in dating.
The day there's an app for people seeking prostitutes where both parties leave stars and text reviews like Airbnb or Uber will be a weird day.
so yeah, weird, but in a good "we finally got rid of a relic of our prudish past" sort of way.
Domain is available, who's in?
Although, I'm interested of designs for later stages - around kids. Any suggestions?
EDIT: Inspired by http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30Surrogate-t.htm... . You really can have it all!
Does anyone remember this / have a link? My Google fu is failing.
I did something similar in 2009 with a custom Wordpress plugin. However, guests were imported from a CSV of our Google Sheet guest list as Wordpress users. Each guest was automatically assigned a randomly generated dinner code. The code was included in the wedding invite card as we wanted to be fairly traditional.
When a guest confirmed they received an email with custom directions from their home address and a printable parking pass. Guests could cancel up to two weeks before the event at which time an email was sent to the caterer. The plugin also generated email reminders 7, 2, and 1 day prior with the same links.
Two weeks prior to our wedding the guest food selections were compiled and sent directly to the caterer for final numbers. Seating charts and name cards with food selections were also printed using the WP database and PDF templates via pdftk.
Guest who provided email addresses were sent photos from the event via Picasa Web Albums 3 weeks after the event.
While this is much lighter weight and as others have expressed fairly impersonal the grooms family and bride probably knew this.
Kudos on a quick and fun implementation! In retrospect I wish I had use Twilio ;)
But an SMS invite I most likely would get back to you within a day, most likely, possibly within ten minutes. For people like me, it's so much easier and much lower friction to respond to a text.
I can be just as bad with email. My parents get responses from me a lot more quickly now that they've started getting into the habit of texting (yes, it's taken that long).
* In this case you can do an SMS Poll asking who would like to come.
* If you want to do this a bit more personal, you could use an IVR Poll instead, so they'd hear your voice.
* You can even go further and build some logic, if they replied yes, then you ask them what food choice do they want, no need for interacting with google spreadsheet.
* You can view all this with some pretty graphs and download the spreadsheet with all the information that happened on the engagement.
* Or if you want fancier stuff, do the above, pass the results to Zapier, and manipulate them with any other apps linked into Zapier.
Disclaimer: I work on engageSPARK
This was built using KooKoo, the Twilio for India and is more of an IVR rather than SMS as India is a voice friendly country, and who does not like to hear the invite in the groom's own voice :)
Its got options for directions etc too, people always seem to call to know the directions to marriage hall :)
I mean, sure, nobody has to get married. But then you might not get custody rights over your children. It might be more difficult to pick your kids up from school. Perhaps it will complicate inheritance. You won't get the tax breaks. You'll have to explain your relationship every time you're introduced to more traditional people, which might include family, or various other people with whom you'd just rather not get into an extended conversation about your life choices. It might complicate banking, especially in case one partner is survived by the other.
There's a direct analog to this in tech. Sure, you're only going to win by innovating. But you have to do so sparingly, knowing that innovation is risky, expensive, and difficult. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, it's best to "just use postgres".
There are certain things worth innovating on. Perhaps the exchange of some token item (a diamond) is worth one of them. For me, it wasn't, I just bought the stupid thing, and got on with my life. It's nice, it'll last, and it's a time-honored tradition I'll never have to get into 1000 annoying discussions over. Life is just too short, everybody knows it's a diamond, we're married, great.
I had a relative that was a jeweler at one point. She's the only person I know who opted out of a diamond engagement ring. "waste of money. there are prettier things that can mean more" Her engagement ring was awesome. I don't know enough about stones to say what it was, but she got compliments frequently.
Or in the case of a lot of folks like myself, it's worth it to break tradition to avoid jumping into a higher tax bracket due to the marriage penalty [1].
Anyway, it's not totally relevant to the main story here, since that was very obviously a "This is the official invitation/confirmation" thing, but I think it's worth considering that if you are going to buck tradition, you should try to be absolutely clear that that's what you're doing so that people can adjust.
The formality isn't empty in the sense that it's purposeless: it's done for a reason.
After all, marriage itself could be considered an empty formality, so if you're going to bother getting married you might as well embrace the formalized aspects of the occasion.
The contractual stuff came later, and is arguably the less important aspect.
If you take the first view, then the formality of the ceremony and its associated traditions isn't empty — it's the whole point. If you think the contractual, legal aspects of marriage are the the only things that matter, then yeah, might as well just sign on the dotted line.
My personal hack that I use for invitations/thank you notes/christmas cards/etc. is this:
You can just create them yourself (any design! copy one off the internet!) in Photoshop/Gimp/Illustrator/PowerPoint/whatever. I won't judge (except if it's PowerPoint).
Then have them printed as 4x6 (or whatever) photos for $0.09 each. With envelopes at $0.03 each and postage at $0.49 you're up to $0.61 per invite, or $85 rather than $480 in OPs case.
We bought the envelopes, but made the cards ourselves to make them more personal and cheaper. (We had a paper cutter and made detailed cutouts in the invite.)
You can check out the code here if interested. It also includes the wedding info site as part of it, so there is a bit of cruft, but I'm sure you could repurpose it if you dug into it deep enough: https://github.com/mvarrieur/vovarrieur-dot-com
Once you play and win the game, it links to a Google Form with your name pre-filled. All the responses go into a spreadsheet, and I can easily do a query against the original spreadsheet to see who still needs to RSVP. Then follow up with those people personally. Overall people really enjoyed the game and thought it was a unique invite.
Plus it saved a crapton of money and trees and gasoline, which was the most important part for me. The wedding industry is built on waste and my fiance and I don't want to support such an outdated, unsustainable tradition.
Are guests expected to purchase their own alcohol at their wedding?
I've been to a few weddings here in Canada with cash bars. Some people really frown on it, but it's not a big deal to me. Some people just can't afford it.
If you're so alcoholic that you can't attend a single meal without being served unlimited alcohol, you should understand that.
British weddings start around 1 or 2pm, while US weddings are just the evening. A full day with an open bar would be insane.
This is what would be expected in the UK, so nobody would be upset about it.
Happy Wife = Happy Life.
I've been to many weddings over the past couple of decades and the one that was most successful in terms of breaking the ice between strangers had simple badges with ${NAME} and ${RELATIONSHIP TO COUPLE} on them. People felt very comfortable striking-up a conversation when they knew these two pieces of data, and there was less 'must remember the name' anxiety.
I'm not sure what the OP had to learn exactly in doing this, or whether he knew it all already, but it's far easier to learn stuff when you have a practical application to apply what you're learning to.
This is such an example, and other people could learn a thing by the approach.
(Although personally I agree, automating is often premature optimisation)
So much critical thinking and negativity in these comments for a fun hack... What's wrong with having fun these days?
It was pretty successful. It saved a ~$1000 in paper invites with postage and the stress of making sure people sent them back. We even had followed-up by sending reminder emails. Which we definitely couldn't have done with paper. The downside is that it's more informal but our guests appreciated the open bar instead.
I'm building something similar for a friend's wedding right now with the intention of having open to the public with features like SMS and table seating generators.
As opposed to the sustainability of dozens of people traveling from near and far.
This is true about almost all human groups/movements though, and I'm not sure that environmentalists are more guilty than average.
But people who drive to work everyday still try and lecture me over nothings like putting a laptop on standby overnight.
I live within 8 miles of the office and subsequently put about 4,000 miles on my vehicle annually. I consume less fuel than 90% of the people in the office with new 'environmentally friendly' cars who live 40 miles away, yet it is I who receives the rash of shit. /rant
Micro-optimizations are often easier to wrap our heads around, so we tend to want to focus on them. They're also often situations where you can get a clear win rather than a much more imperfect improvement. In development, it's sometimes called bikeshedding. You see it often in financial planning where people would rather cut out their morning latte than focus on investing better.
This behavior makes little sense, but it does appear to be a fundamental human tendency and those who are better able to maintain perspective definitely have a huge advantage in life.
Dropping paper invitations has very little real inconvenience factor, so people do it and tout their environmentalism to receive their karma from their friends that care about that type of signaling.
When it comes to making a real sacrifice (e.g. not inviting people who would fly to the wedding), you will find very few people willing to do that.
It's the reason the prius is so incredibly popular compared to fully electric cars. It comes with the environmentalism bragging rights while still burning plenty of fuel so there is no change in lifestyle. Toyota was even nice enough to build it in a weird shape so people can easily see how forward thinking and smart you are.
Everybody seems to forget paper is a renewable resource. Cutting and re-growing as it is practiced in the regulated world (ie. all countries with stable governments) is actually good for the environment.
Missing forest for trees etc.
From the article: "Finally, invites are not environmentally friendly as they are one time use and easily lost or misplaced."
No, but they have in common that both != action.
>If someone twigs that they could cycle to work instead of driving - win.
I don't think those are actual wins. Those are empty feel good gestures when 350 million others will continue to just drive. Only coordinated action, and even better legislation, matters.
Easy small wins of that kind are feel-good gestures that get detrimental to actual change.
The goal should be making a difference, not token improvements.
The goal should be to maximize the impact of the changes you make.
To be a little more accurate, "They're doing what they choose to." Nobody does what they can.
My problem is in even saying that this is an environmental decision, like that matters at all.
Doing what you could would be choosing another solution.
I think the point people are trying to make is that it's silly, misleading, and hypocritical for people to pat themselves on the back for making a tiny token effort to protect the environment while participating in activities that are overall terrible for the environment.
If that's what they want to do, good for them, but let's not pretend they're making a real effort.
It's a great CRM for the sort of thing you're considering.
i wish i had such small wedding
There's no joy in receiving an automated message any more than there is joy in listening to an IVRS voice or an automated sales call. I'd be happier if I received a simple handwritten note or a phone call from a friend inviting me to something than if I was one of 1000 automated recipients of fancy gold-plated card.
For instance, a friend wrote a script to auto reply to people who had wished him on his birthday (he wasn't hiding it, so I didn't have to guess that it was an auto-reply).
Now, the way FB displays and folds posts made on your timeline makes it very difficult and painstaking to reply to a lot of them (if you refresh your page by mistake, you'd have to keep clicking on More... multiple times to get back to where you left). So I'd be completely fine with him posting a common status saying Thank You to everyone.
But knowing that it's a bot reply kinda took away the point of the reply, at least for me.
I cringe at getting one of those hand-written save the date cards... knowing full well each one cost the host $5+ and all the time of writing those addresses. And all for what? So it can sit in my mailbox for a month with all the spam grocery store coupons until the next time I check? So inefficient.
I love this so much. I love the simplicity of it. Someone needs to set this up as a real service...
Upload a list of names and cell numbers...
Wedding tool confirms names, asks for photo so they can auto-sort photos of you.
Stolen from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102182 -- Wedding tool posts pictures of people who RSVP'd as solo and let's them Tinder each other. What a brilliant idea!
Along with lettings singles match up... the tool could let people say who they wanted to sit next to, and who they didn't... taking a lot of the stress off the bride for seating arrangements.
Wedding tool sends save the date RSVPs. Wedding tool sends status updates to all guests in real time... allows people to see if other friends will be there... (I know there are some weddings I only go to if I know enough other friends from college are going.)
Wedding tool sends link to some pretty online invite... with some cute backstory about the couple, or just their TheKnot page.
Wedding tool sends wedding registry to people... segmented would be hot. (I hate how people send those sorts of lists with huge gifts on them to everyone... a lot of that stuff should be targeted towards family, or long-time friends. Toasters and other $50 items for people flying in from out of state.)
Wedding tool figures out dinner options.
Wedding tool sends reminders, calendar invites, cute little pre-wedding marketing posts to generate some excitement. Polls users to share stories about the couple.
Wedding tool lets guests upload photos during the event, tracks back name to their phone number so all they have to do is text photos to the designated number. All photos are available in real time... and to all the guests after. (Of course some level of cleanup could be manually applied after the wedding.)
Wedding tool sends out thank you, links to photos you sent, photos with you in them... lets you say if you want your name tagged in it... or if you think photo is objectionable and should be removed...
Man, I want to go to that wedding... I never want to see another hand-written invite, having been suckered into writing about 500 of those once... yeah it's just torture that the couple inflicts on their closest friends. When my buddy who asked me to write cards was having some trouble, my first thought was literally, "Bro, stay with this girl... I ain't writing invites for you ever again... you'll die alone without her." Ha.
Maybe you can automate your divorce too.
(note: this is a joking reference to a meme.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/this-is-the-future-l...
Feel free to down-vote but at least realize what it is).
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102195 and marked it off-topic.
see: https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/this-is-the-future-l...
It is not really a political opinion on what liberals want!
Although out of context, of course, it doesn't make sense anymore. I would delete it if I could.