How to Invite People for Large Parties

In order to insure the success of your large party, you will need to utilize “word-of-mouth” marketing. Do not make flyers! Your party will already be generating a lot of attention on the night of the party, and you don’t want the school having evidence that you were advertising your party. You can utilize Facebook as a supplement to “phone call,” personal, and sorority inviting tactics. 

Make sure that the Facebook event is on private and doesn’t mention your address or any alcohol. This will help you if the school finds out about your party. If there’s no evidence that your party occurred at a specific location or had alcohol, then you can defend yourself by saying that the event was an inside joke, etc.

Make sure that every brother calls up their girls. Word will soon spread and it will be the talk of the campus. You should start spreading the word the week of your party.

Note: All of your cocktail and large parties should be on the sororities’ calendars. This is another way to let girls know that you are having a party.

How to Invite People for Cocktail Parties--Part II

Since no girl goes to any party by herself, then she will bring her friends. If you are getting a lot of calls from girls who want to know if they can come, even though they didn’t get an invitation, then you have succeeded. Remember to tell these girls that they can come. Also tell them that you will send them an invitation for the next cocktail party. Now you have made these girls feel like her friends, instead of feel less than their friends.

Therefore, if you send out over 120 invitations, then you can expect an excess of 300 girls at your party. Assume each girl will bring one to two friends each, and some girls won’t come. These invitations should be sent out no earlier than four days prior to and no later than two days prior to your party. If you send them out too early, girls will forget about the party. If you send it out too late, then they might have other plans for that night.

You should have the younger guys in your frat give the invitations to the girls. The ideal distribution would be to give them to girls in class in front of their friends. You can also go to their apartments and give it to them (if they’re home) or slide it under the door (if they’re not there). Here is an example of a basic cocktail party invitation. Remember to print it on nicer paper with a small design. Also the printed invitation should be easy to read.

Cocktail Party Invitation (in a fancy font, such as Lucida Handwriting. Or download more fonts from dafont.com.)

 

Dear «First_Name»,

You are cordially invited to attend a night of entertainment at: 

[Your frat]’s “[insert theme]” cocktail party

When: [Day, Date, Year]

Where: [Your frat’s address]

Time: [Put time, such as 10pm—2am]

 

Please come in semi-formal attire.

Sincerely,

[Your frat’s name] Social Committee

How to Invite People for Cocktail Parties--Part I

Since these types of parties are only once or twice a quarter (more often if you are in the semester system), then you should spend extra effort to make them more special and unique. These are “brothers-only” or “one guest per brother” parties so these events are more personal. With that being said, you should use invitations as your main source of advertising. Ask your brothers for names and addresses of girls that they would like to invite for the cocktail party. Compile the list and make personalized invitations for each girl on the list. 

Your job will be a lot easier if you utilize Microsoft Excel and Word to make the invitations. There is a “Mail Merge” function in Microsoft Word that will insert and consecutively print the first names of an Excel spreadsheet. If you take the time to do it once, you can do it over and over again for your parties. This saves you time of manually inputting the girls first names. Look for inexpensive themed printer paper at Staples or Michael’s.

Personalized invitations work extremely well for insuring the success of your event. When a girl receives her invitation, she will feel special and privileged that she got a personal invite to your fraternity’s party. She will be impressed that you even addressed the invitation personally to her by putting her first name after “Dear.” She’ll most likely think that you took the time to type a personal invitation just for her. She doesn’t know about the genius of “Mail Merge.” Check out About.com's tutorial on how to use Mail Merge

Not everyone will be getting an invitation, and this boosts the self-esteem of a girl. Often girls will hang up your frat’s cocktail party invitations in their rooms as a trophy to show their friends. If you are worried about offending girls, then don’t be. The whole point is to offend the girls because it makes the party seem more special and exclusive. I know that seems like a messed up idea, but it actually works. More in the next post.

How to Promote Your Party

How is someone going to come to your party, if they don’t know about it? That’s where effective advertising comes in to making people come to your party. Your advertising and promoting tactics will change depending on the magnitude of your party. Any sort of promotion should be done in advance, which means at the very least, one day’s notice. 

The one constant way to always promote your party is the simplest. Personally going up to a girl and telling her about the party is the most effective way of making sure that girl will come to your party. In the girl’s mind, she feels special that you took time out of your busy “social chair day” to invite her to the party. She assumes that you might send out a Facebook event invite or other mass party invitation (which you didn’t do), and she is impressed that you invited her in a different way. Her self-esteem has been boosted by your personal invitation. She will thank you for making her feel special by coming to your party.

Since you can’t find every girl and tell them about the party in person, the next best thing is the phone call. You should call up girls to come to the party. Do not text them. Actually call them on the phone. Believe it or not, this takes a lot of skill and time to effectively do. Most people fail when doing this. Why? When a girl answers the phone, the guy immediately says something like, “Hello, _______. We are having a party tonight at my frat.” Then the conversation ends about 15 seconds later. You think a girl is going to feel special because you “called her?” Hell no! You just did the same thing as a mass text, which girls despise. She’ll be less likely to come to your party now.

The real way to effective utilize “the phone call” takes time and skill. Like sex, you can’t just stick it in. You have to spend some time “revving” her up. When you call one of your girls, the last thing you should say is something about the party. You need to talk about anything else, but the party. Ask her a question about something. See how her day was. Have a five minute conversation about something. After you feel that you are both comfortably chatting, then you should weave in a line about the party. 

Some good lines to use: “I haven’t seen you in a while. Let’s hang out tonight. We are having our ______ party at my frat house. You should come.” You can also use, “Any plans for tonight? Well, we are having our _____ party at my frat house. I would love to see you tonight.”

If you notice, the last line talks about you wanting to see her tonight. This is effective as it makes the girl feel special that you want to hang out with her. If you are really good at the “phone call” inviting, then the girl won’t even realize that the whole point of you calling her was to call her about the party. The “phone call” invitation is most effective the afternoon or couple days before the night of the party. There are many other ways to promote for your party as well.