Punchbowl Blog

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

Our most recent release includes a feature we’ve all been anxious to have on the site: fun RSVP styles! Now when you send an invitation you can choose or customize your own phrases and sayings for your guest RSVP responses. For example, let’s say you’re throwing your annual Talk Like a Pirate Day party (coming up on Sept 19th). You might want to use our Pirate RSVP style for your guest responses.

Here’s how it works:

1 - Create your event and design your Invitation

2 - When you get to the Invitation Options page, choose Yes under “Show the guest list and the responses on the invitation?“

3 - Click the RSVP Styles button

4 - Choose one of our preset RSVP Styles or write your own!

The interface includes a preview of what it looks like on your invitation:

Enjoy!

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

Our latest site update includes a welcome new feature for all the eCard senders out there. We’ve taken the “Dashboard” concept from our Party Planning site and applied it to our eCards site.

What does this mean? Sign in to your account to view all your past, present and scheduled ecards on your eCard Dashboard page! Here are the highlights:

• Save - Want to create an eCard but save it for later? Just sign in, design the card then save it. It will be saved and waiting on your Dashboard until you want to send.
• Add Recipients - Already sent an eCard but want to sent it to more recipients? Just click “Add Recipients” next to the card on your Dashboard and you’re on your way.
• Edit - Sent an eCard with an embarrassing mistake? Just click “edit” on the Dashboard to change the card. It will be updated for all future viewers.
• Share - Want to share your card on Twitter or Facebook? Click “Share” from the Dashboard.
• View - Just want to bask in the glory of past eCards? You can view them all on the new eCards Dashboard.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

If you use our Birthday Reminders service you probably enjoy getting reminders for all of the birthdays in your life. You can even customize when you receive reminders on your settings page. It’s great to know a birthday is coming up in a week or two, and now you can do something about it!

Our newest eCards improvement allows you to schedule an eCard to be sent at a future date. Just create your eCard as you normally would. When you get to the Preview & Send page you’ll notice a new option under the Send eCard now button - “Send it later”:

Click this option to schedule your ecard:

Next time you get a birthday reminder schedule an eCard to be sent!

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

It’s a request we heard many times: “My event spans multiple days, how can I show that on my invitation?”

Well we finally have an answer. Simply click “Add end date” when you’re choosing a date for your event and we’ll display the start and end date on your invitation.

Enjoy!

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

We’ve recently made some great updates to the site and you’ll be hearing more about them soon. I thought I’d highlight one that you probably noticed if you signed into your account recently.

If you connected your Facebook and MyPunchbowl accounts, we now automatically import your Facebook events and list them in your MyPunchbowl Dashboard along with your other events. We’ll even show your response status to Facebook events and let you click through to them from your Dash. This is a great way to centralize all of your social activities in one place.

Don’t want to see a certain Facebook event on your Dashboard? Just archive it or delete it.

Connect your accounts and check it out!

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

Do you have ideas for princess birthday party favors that you want to share with other moms? How about a recipe for a choo-choo train birthday cake? Maybe you have great ideas for games to play at a baby shower or music to play at a graduation party?

Now is your chance to channel your inner Penelope by sharing your great tips and party advice with other MyPunchbowl party planners on the new MyPunchbowl Forums. Everyone has a little bit of wisdom to share—advice or tips to share from past party experience from food and decorations to supplies and etiquette.

MyPunchbowl Forums are also great if you’re currently planning a party and have questions or need creative ideas. Post your questions to the forums and get feedback from others who have been in your shoes.

Lastly, MyPunchbowl Forums have a section specifically for posting your suggestions for us. These could be suggestions about our product—features you’d like to see or ideas you have about how we can improve the site. There is also a thread in which you can make invitation design suggestions.

I invite you to check out MyPunchbowl Forums to start sharing your party planning wisdom and suggestions today!

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

We released an update to the site last week and one of the new features that has the team excited is the introduction of a site-wide global navigation bar at the top of the page:

You may have noticed that over the past few months we’ve greatly expanded the services that MyPunchbowl offers. We now have eCards, Birthday Reminders, Engagement Announcements, plus others.

The new global navigation bar may not be the kind of thing that slaps you across the face and says “I’m an awesome new feature!!” but we think it is a really nice way to both navigate through the site and convey all that we have to offer.

I’d also like to announce a contest  to name the little “dot” that indicates where you are in the site (see above … it’s on Birthday Reminders). Current suggestions include “the notch”, “the dot”, and “the nubbit”.

Post your entries in the comments below. The winner will receive a free hug from Devin, our graphic designer.

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

Besides web browsers, the program that I use most often and most successfully is definitely SnagIt. If you haven’t heard of it, SnagIt (made by TechSmith) is a screen capture tool plus an image editor. Basically it lets you capture an image of what’s on your screen (or a portion of it) and then you can edit that image, move things around and add text and arrows and stuff. That’s just the basics really, it does a whole lot more.

~disclaimer - there is no disclaimer! I have no relationship with TechSmith - I just love SnagIt!!~

I’ve used SnagIt for a few years now and I’d like to think I’m pretty good with it. But the best part of the program is that it doesn’t take long to get good with it. The Editor portion of the program has just enough of what you want to do. It’s like Photoshop but without all the slew of tools and buttons that you can’t easily figure out how to use and wow there are a lot of them and man all you really want to do is grab this line of text and move it a few pixels down! With the SnagIt editor you just draw a box around it and move it.

We find SnagIt invaluable for quickly testing out interface ideas or making mockups or pointing out something in an interface.

Enough said - if you’re at all curious they have a free 30 day trial. Seriously now, I don’t know anyone at TechSmith!! But maybe they’ll send me a T-shirt??

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

As you know from Matt’s post yesterday, we just launched MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders — an easy and dependable way to keep track of the birthdays that matter the most.

We got some great press coverage about MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders and I thought I’d share some of it with you.

Terrence Russell from VentureBeat writes:

 ”Although I’ve seen my share of reminder/event tools, what makes the Birthday Reminder service interesting is its call to action. Whereas Facebook and MySpace mostly leverage birth dates for gift giving/micro-transactions within their sites, the Birthday Reminder service folds seamlessly into MyPunchbowl’s activity driven focus by referring users to its party planning application and free eCards. From there, it kind of makes sense to transform static birthday reminders into…well, actual birthday parties.”

Josh Lowensohn from CNET’s Webware writes:

“Where the system holds real value is that it’s deeply tied into MyPunchbowl’s other services. For instance, if it’s someone you were never intending to get a gift or a real card for, you can simply use MyPunchbowl’s eCard service and send it to them using the information you’ve already gathered. By contrast, you can also turn around and begin planning a party right away using the built-in tools.”

So what do you think? Have you tried MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders yet? Create your own birthday reminder list for free at http://www.punchbowl.com/birthday-reminders.

This post was written by Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO

By now I hope you’ve heard that we launched a new service today: MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders. I’m really proud of how this product came together, and I hope that it will be very useful to our customers. I thought I’d take a few moments to explain why we decided to create this new product.

Birthdays are a big part of our business. Whether it’s on our party planning site or on our free eCards site, our customers love to celebrate birthdays using MyPunchbowl. Personally, I use MyPunchbowl eCards a few times a month to wish someone a happy birthday with a personalized eCard, and about once or twice a year I’m involved with planning a birthday party on MyPunchbowl. As the CEO of MyPunchbowl, I know it’s important to improve our birthday-related functionality.

I’ve always looked at reminder services and thought they were very useful — especially for remembering birthdays. A handful of years ago, my wife signed up for a birthday alarm service, and I’ve seen how she’s used it to remember important birthdays. While she uses a web-based service, most of the birthdays I want to remember are in my personal calendar. Although my calendar usually helps me remember (at least during the week), more often than not I find myself wishing that I had gotten a reminder before the actual birthday.

Before we started working on the birthday reminders product, I spent a lot of time looking at the existing birthday reminder services. Most of the existing sites that are out there are very outdated or too simplistic. One site that stands apart is Facebook (both as a native service and several Facebook applications). Isn’t *everyone* on Facebook these days? Why would we launch a new service that already exists as part of Facebook?

As I see it, MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders solves a different problem. I don’t know about you, but like many Facebook users, I have hundreds of “friends” in my social network on Facebook. Frankly, I don’t care about most of their birthdays. MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders are for the 30-40 people you actually care about, and want a reminder. We see it as a much more personal service for keeping track of those birthdays that matter (and especially useful for birthdays of people who are *not* on Facebook, such as kids, parents and grandparents).

We built MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders so that our customers could build a useful list of birthday reminders — just the ones you want to make sure you don’t forget. In my list, I have my close friends, my nieces and nephews, my brothers, and other close family members (yes cuz, you made it in). My entire list is about 35 people. I don’t expect it to grow much, and it’s really comforting to know that I’ll get a few reminders before the actual birthday rolls around. And one of my favorite features? MyPunchbowl keeps track of the age of everyone on my list. Very useful.

If you haven’t set up your birthday reminder list yet, give it a shot: it will only take 5 minutes to get started and you can always come back and add more. Try it out for free at http://www.punchbowl.com/birthday-reminders

Here’s a screenshot of our new service. Let us know what you think in the comments of this blog post.