Punchbowl Blog

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

Many people love to travel, but very few actually enjoy planning trips. That’s why we’ve built a Travel Center right into Punchbowl that makes it easy for your guests to make travel accommodations for those “can’t miss” events on your calendar. The Travel Center allows your guests to find the most affordable flights, cars, and hotels available.

First, make sure the Travel Center option is turned on for your guests. Just go to the Invitation Options page of your workflow and select “yes” next to the option for Travel Center. Then, once your guests respond that they are attending your event, they are brought to the Travel Center, which is powered by Kayak.com.

This is what it looks like:

The Travel Center feature is ideal for weddings, graduations, family reunions, and holiday parties in which you expect guests will need to make travel arrangements in order to attend. Check it out next time you plan a party that requires guests to travel and make your event easier for them to attend!

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

Let’s face it: not all gifts are created equal. Birthdays, showers, and holiday celebrations are never “complete” without the blunders of a few well-meaning friends or relatives. How many sweaters have you received but never worn? How many books have never made it to your shelves? You want to be polite, but sometimes it can be difficult. After all, how can you tell your mother-in-law that you have no use for the horrendous tableware she purchased for you? And won’t your sister notice that you never wear the earrings she gave you?

MyPunchbowl eliminates the awkwardness of unwanted gifts with our Gift Registry feature. All you need is an Amazon.com wish list or registry and you’re ready to get started. If you aren’t familiar with Amazon, it’s an easy to use, one-stop shopping mega site with almost everything you could ever want or need, including clothes, jewelry, electronics, home goods, baby gear, movies, music, toys, sports equipment, and even gift cards.

To add a gift registry to your invitation, click “Yes” when asked if you’d like to add a gift registry.

Then, you’ll see some simple instructions on how to either create or add an Amazon wish list to your invitation. You can choose a basic Amazon wish list, an Amazon Baby Registry, or an Amazon Wedding Registry. Once you add the name or email address of the guest of honor, you’ll see the items in the wish list or registry fill in below.

Once you send your invitations, your guests will see the gift registry after they respond. It will be under the “Gift Ideas” tab and will look something like this:

It’s great to have a gift registry built right into the invitation for baby showers, bridal showers, and birthday parties. We all know it’s the thought that counts but sometimes guests struggle with gift ideas so why not make it easy on them. Whether you’re the host or the guest of honor, a gift registry will certainly ensure you get what you want!

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

We’re starting to see lots of family reunions planned on MyPunchbowl lately. Summer is a great time to catch up with family members that you only see around the winter holidays. Whether you plan a day at the beach, a family cookout, or a weekend up at the lake, the combination of warm weather, great food, and family make for a terrific family reunion.

Planning a family reunion for your family this summer? We have a few suggestions for how to make the event personal and memorable for the whole family!

1. Use a family photo on your invitation. Choose a summer-inspired invitation design that fits your reunion activity (beach, cookout, etc.) and customize it with a picture of the whole family from the last time you were together. It will definitely get everyone excited for the event!
2. Ask relatives to bring their famous dishes. Make the event a potluck and have relatives sign up to bring certain items. Everyone in the family is famous for something, whether it’s Aunt Theresa’s apple pie or Cousin Jimmy’s chicken wings!
3. Personalize favors for your reunion. Surprise everyone at the reunion with custom t-shirts! We’ve seen everything from old family photos and the family name on a shirt to the location of the reunion with the family name and date. The more creative, the better. You can even print up matching signs and banners to put around your campground or lake house.
4. Plan a family slide show. Collect family photos—old and new—from everyone and put together a slide show. You can set it to songs like “We are Family,” “Homeward Bound,” “Forever Young,” and “These Are the Times to Remember.”
5. Take video and send highlights after the reunion. Using a Flip, iPhone, or even the video option on your digital camera, take video of the reunion. After the reunion, send an eCard to everyone who attended that includes the video you took of the event, or even just one particularly funny/touching moment.

Your relatives will have such a wonderful time at this reunion, they’ll want you to make it an annual tradition!

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

Stumped for ideas on where to throw your next party? MyPunchbowl can help solve that problem with Venue Finder!

Since venue availability can often influence event date, Venue Finder is one of the first steps in the party planning workflow. To find a venue, first start a new event. Once you’ve answered a few simple questions about your event (when is the event, what type of event, etc.), you’ll proceed to Venue Finder.

Your event type will be pre-populated based on your answer from the preview page so all you need to do is enter your zip code and hit the “Search” button.

The results for relevant venues in your area will look like this:

You’ll see a combination of Featured Venues at top of the search results as well as Additional Venues in your area that meet your criteria. You can also zoom in/out on the Google map to get a better idea of the venue locations.

Once you find a venue, click the “Select” button. This will give you the option to add the venue directly onto your invitation.

When you choose “Yes, continue” and select an invitation design, you’ll notice the venue name and location will be automatically pre-populated onto your design.

Even if you have an event venue in mind, it doesn’t hurt to do a quick search in Venue Finder. You might learn about a terrific venue in your area that you didn’t even know existed!

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

An event is only as good as its guest list. Imagine a bachelorette party without the maid of honor, a baby shower without the grandmothers, or a class reunion without the class clown. Even summer cookouts and birthday parties are dependent on that core group of people who make your events unforgettable.

It’s often a nightmare to try to find a date that works for your VIP’s, let alone your entire guest list. Enter MyPunchbowl Date Decider. Date Decider allows hosts to collaborate with friends on the best date before sending the invitations.

To get started, just start planning your event on MyPunchbowl. You’ll be prompted to enter when you want to send invitations. Choose this option:

Next, write a brief message to your guests and enter the possible event dates that you have in mind. You can also rank these dates according to what works best for you, as the host.

From there, enter the email addresses of the guests that you’d like to confer with and send the Date Decider.

The rest is simple! Just wait for your guests to respond to find out the best date. Keep in mind that as guests respond you might notice the recommended date could change. That’s why it’s best to wait for everyone to respond, especially anyone marked as a VIP.

Once you have the event date, you’ll be able to really start planning the party. All of this without ever picking up the phone, sending around endless strings of emails, or stepping on anyone’s toes!

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

One of the most time consuming tasks on any party planners’ to-do list is finding and securing the party vendors. First, you need to identify the vendors you need. Next up is finding a few options to explore their services, see examples of their work, and discuss availability. Then, it’s on to determining which vendor to hire and working out the specific details of your event.

Depending on the type of event, your local vendor needs will vary. For a large-scale event like a bar mitzvah or wedding, you’ll likely need to find a venue, photographer, band or DJ, caterer, bakery, attire, florist, event rentals, and maybe even transportation. For an event like a kid’s birthday party, you’ll probably need balloons, bakery, party rentals like a bounce house or cotton candy machine, and entertainment like a clown or magician.

MyPunchbowl Vendors can easily help you find party vendors in your area for all types of events from life milestones like baby showers and birthdays to corporate events to weddings and anniversaries and everything in between.

To begin, select the type of vendor you need from the drop-down menu and enter your zip code as shown below:

Your search will return several pages of results. Some search results pages include “Featured” listings. These are enhanced listings that often include a photo gallery or a link back to the vendor’s website.

Here are a few examples of the types of vendor listings you’ll find on MyPunchbowl:

• Bliss By Design Events 
• Jumping Beans of Greenville, LLC
• DeVault Family Vineyards

Start the search for local vendors for your next event! It’s never too early to book vendors for the busy holiday season!

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

Our approach to building the website has always been to solve real problems surrounding planning an event. We have developed a full suite of awesome features using this strategy. I’d like to take you through one of the purest examples of this on the site - a feature we call “Relationships”.

Here’s the scenario:

- You’re planning a birthday party.

- On your guest list you have a mix of friends, including the following families and couples:

• Smith family of 4:
  • Parents Carl & Jenna
  • Kids Molly and Finn
• Married couple Jimmy and Kendra Barksdale
• Your friend Colin and his date Liz

- You want to keep an accurate guest count while making it clear to each guest which of their significant others or family members are invited.

***Enter the Relationships feature!***

It all starts on your Add Guests page.

1 - First, add all the guests who you have email addresses for using one of our many import or entry methods. The guests are queued up in your Guests to Invite list on the right side of the Add Guests page:

2 - Click the Relationships tab above the Guests to Invite list:

Here you can “connect” anyone in your guest list with another guest.

3 - I’ll connect Jimmy and Kendra since they are married. To do this, I just click “Add a relationship” under Jimmy and choose Kendra:

Jimmy and Kendra are now connected in my guest list:

4 - Next I want to connect the Smith family. I have emails for the parents Carl & Jenna but I don’t have emails for their kids. First, I connect Carl to Jenna:

Now I add another relationship to Jenna, but this time I choose “New person” since the kids are not in my guest list:

I add Finn the same way and the Smith family is complete:

I can do the same for Colin and Liz and now I’m ready to send invitations.

___________________________________________________________________

Now, how does this all play out for your guests?

1 - When Jimmy receives his invitation he is informed that his wife Kendra is also invited:

2 - Jimmy responds Yes and then has the option to respond for Kendra:

When Kendra opens her invitation she will have the same ability to respond for Jimmy (or view his response if he has already RSVP’d)

I hope you’re starting to see the beauty of this feature. Without it, Jimmy would not have known if Kendra was invited. He might have responded Yes and then added a “+1″ for Kendra. Kendra might have done the same thing. Then the host would have 4 Yes RSVPs when it should really be 2.

3 - Carl Smith receives an invitation and sees that his family is also invited:

4 - Carl can RSVP for everyone in his family, even though the kids never received an invitation:

5 - As the host, all of this is laid out clearly on your manage Guests page:

I hope it’s clear the level of thought and design that went into our Relationships feature. Use it for your next event and let us know what you think!

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

Now that we are halfway through the month of March, the days are getting longer and spring is just around the corner. What a perfect time for the start of National Spring Fever Week! How are you celebrating spring? It’s a great time to do some spring cleaning or plan a weekend getaway!

Today is also the start of National Wildlife Week and American Chocolate Week. We love chocolate at Punchbowl and really like the idea of hosting an iron chef party where the main ingredient is chocolate!

This week also includes two events that surely signify spring is almost here…St. Patrick’s Day and the start of March Madness! Whether you’re hosting an informal St. Patty’s Day dinner or are heading to the bars to celebrate and watch college hoops, we have everything you need to get started. Start planning your party!

This week’s other reasons to celebrate include:

• March 15: National Pears Helene Day
• March 16: National Artichoke Hearts Day
• March 17: St. Patrick’s Day
• March 18: Oatmeal Cookie Day
• March 19: National Chocolate Caramel Day
• March 20: Snowman Burning Day
• March 21: National French Bread Day

Want to be the first to know about our Reasons to Celebrate? You can now sign up to receive a daily email with the day’s Reasons to Celebrate! Just sign in to your MyPunchbowl account, go to the “Settings” tab, and check the box to receive the “Daily Reasons to Celebrate updates” under “Emails from MyPunchbowl.”

Have a great week!

This post was written by Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO. Follow him on Twitter @mattdouglas

I’m very excited to announce that MyPunchbowl has acquired I’m In! — a site for local vendors. With the acquisition of I’m in! MyPunchbowl has entered the local party planning market. Our new local vendor portal enables our users to find vendors for their parties and events. To check it out, visit our new local vendors portal.

We’ll be sending out a press release in the morning, but TechCrunch broke the story this evening.

Here is the official announcement: 

Punchbowl Software, Inc., developers of the start to finish party planning site MyPunchbowl.com, today announced the acquisition of I’m In! (imin.com), through a transaction with GroupGo LLC. I’m In! previously operated as a site for group travel and local trip ideas. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Using assets of I’m In!, MyPunchbowl today launches a comprehensive local vendor portal for the party planning market. The new MyPunchbowl local vendor portal includes over one million vendors that are suitable for parties and events. Vendor categories include Artists, Attire, Bakeries, Balloons, Bands, Caterers, Churches & Synagogues, DJs, Entertainers, Event Planners, Event Staffing & Services, Florists, Musicians, Photographers, Rentals & Equipment, Transportation, and Venues & Locations.

“Our new local vendor portal enables small businesses to connect directly with consumers who are actively planning events,” said Matt Douglas, CEO, Punchbowl Software. “The acquisition of I’m in! has accelerated our entry into the local party planning market.”

The local vendor portal also includes the ability to search for party venues and locations. As hosts plan events on MyPunchbowl, they can now search for a venue for their party in the new venue finder. Hosts enter their location and choose from twelve venue categories including birthday party venues for kids & adults, restaurants, and baby shower venues. After a venue is selected, hosts can populate the location and address directly onto their online invitation.

MyPunchbowl also now offers featured listings for venues. Featured locations receive priority placement on the venue finder. Retail venues and chains that service the party planning market can contact MyPunchbowl to get a featured listing.

Visit the MyPunchbowl local vendor portal to search vendors for your next event.

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

It happens to everyone at some point - you need to cancel an event that you’ve already invited people to.

With our latest release, we make it a little easier on you and your guests. If you need to cancel your event, just choose Cancel Event from the Event Options menu on your Dashboard:

We’ll take you through it step by step and we even include an option to send your guests a message:

But wait, there’s more! If you need to reschedule your event we’ll give you the option to copy to get you started:

We hope your event goes off without a hitch, but now if you do need to cancel you can do so with confidence.