How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding

In my opinion, this makes the whole process very impersonal. I invited people to my wedding because I care about them and wanted them to share that day with me. Although it was a lot of effort, I was happy to make save the dates, invitations, and hand write thank you notes to every singe one of them. If you're not willing to do that, then you're inviting too many people in my opinion.

I didn&#x27;t go as far as using automated messages with my guests, but<p>- organised everything, from guests attendance to guests in tables location, in a huge Gsheets with my wife and a few close relatives.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>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&#x27;t a good idea.

Author here.<p>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.<p>Plus it may sound strange but we don&#x27;t have all of our friends postal addresses noted down, so mailing out invites would have been even more cumbersome.

I like it, but I think if I&#x27;d sent out save the dates via SMS for my wedding I&#x27;d have been sleeping alone for quite a while.

And the divorce announcement will be an &quot;Our incredible journey&quot; post on Medium.

For the whole pipeline, you should also connect:<p>Tinder + your calendar app + Opentable<p>to automate the dating process.<p>The output of that can be the input of this.

Hmm, not entirely sure I would title this wedding at scale. It does seem like a fairly standard wedding size. Great homebrew solution though.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Guest who provided email addresses were sent photos from the event via Picasa Web Albums 3 weeks after the event.<p>While this is much lighter weight and as others have expressed fairly impersonal the grooms family and bride probably knew this.<p>Kudos on a quick and fun implementation! In retrospect I wish I had use Twilio ;)

I&#x27;m terrible at responding to physical invitations (I had two friends actually have to ask me in person after I didn&#x27;t get back to them for over a month).<p>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&#x27;s so much easier and much lower friction to respond to a text.<p>I can be just as bad with email. My parents get responses from me a lot more quickly now that they&#x27;ve started getting into the habit of texting (yes, it&#x27;s taken that long).

Are you going to continue family life the automated way? Perhaps start a family using Jenkins: an enjoyable build process, lots of tests along the way, and release to production once they&#x27;re out of college.

Hi, For people who want to do this but don&#x27;t want to code anything, you can use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engagespark.com&#x2F;twilio-alternative&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engagespark.com&#x2F;twilio-alternative&#x2F;</a><p>* In this case you can do an SMS Poll asking who would like to come.<p>* If you want to do this a bit more personal, you could use an IVR Poll instead, so they&#x27;d hear your voice.<p>* 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.<p>* You can view all this with some pretty graphs and download the spreadsheet with all the information that happened on the engagement.<p>* Or if you want fancier stuff, do the above, pass the results to Zapier, and manipulate them with any other apps linked into Zapier.<p>Disclaimer: I work on engageSPARK

What are the odds, wrote this blog exactly 5 years ago,to the day, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.kookoo.in&#x2F;2012&#x2F;04&#x2F;wedding-ivr.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.kookoo.in&#x2F;2012&#x2F;04&#x2F;wedding-ivr.html</a><p>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&#x27;s own voice :)<p>Its got options for directions etc too, people always seem to call to know the directions to marriage hall :)

Physical wedding invitations are still tradition such that people may get offended if they do not get one in the mail.

I&#x27;m surprised that he didn&#x27;t find another solution to the cost of sending ~ 140 (70*2) invites for ~ £380 ($480), or $3.50 per invite. The profit margins people make on those invite cards is huge.<p>My personal hack that I use for invitations&#x2F;thank you notes&#x2F;christmas cards&#x2F;etc. is this:<p>You can just create them yourself (any design! copy one off the internet!) in Photoshop&#x2F;Gimp&#x2F;Illustrator&#x2F;PowerPoint&#x2F;whatever. I won&#x27;t judge (except if it&#x27;s PowerPoint).<p>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&#x27;re up to $0.61 per invite, or $85 rather than $480 in OPs case.

My wife and I did something a little similar. I built out our RSVP system on a web app, but we still printed actual invitations pointing people to go to our website, with a unique handwritten code on each one.<p>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&#x27;m sure you could repurpose it if you dug into it deep enough: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mvarrieur&#x2F;vovarrieur-dot-com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mvarrieur&#x2F;vovarrieur-dot-com</a>

I did something similar: I made a little Javascript web game which you have to play and win in order to RSVP. Made a spreadsheet of guests and their emails, and emailed them all using the Mail Merge extension for Google Sheets.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t want to support such an outdated, unsustainable tradition.

&gt; It is a cash bar, so please bring sufficient money with you as there is no nearby cash machine.<p>Are guests expected to purchase their own alcohol at their wedding?

I&#x27;m working on a check-in system for our reception using a Raspberry Pi, a RC522 reader and MIFARE RFID cards. Guests tap their card to check-in and the monitor displays their table number. I&#x27;ll log their check-in time among other things. Is there a point to it? No, it&#x27;s just to be fun and cool.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joshaidan&#x2F;wedding-checkin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joshaidan&#x2F;wedding-checkin</a>

Lol. No wonder Nerds are single. There are events in life which are very personal and people value it when you actually spend time for them and with them.

What happens when some oldie replies &quot;Sorry, I&#x27;d love to say yes but Wilbur&#x27;s having his heart surgery that weekend.&quot;?

hah, I thought I was a nerd until I saw this. I wish I had done this for my wedding. Kudos!

Why do you need to &quot;automate&quot; an action you&#x27;re expecting to perform, in the happy case, once in a lifetime?

You&#x27;re missing the bitcoin registry.

I built a platform to manage invites using email for my wedding. We tracked delivery and opens. On the wedding website itself, we were able to have RSVPs for the people we sent to, intake song requests with Spotify with autocomplete.<p>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&#x27;t have done with paper. The downside is that it&#x27;s more informal but our guests appreciated the open bar instead.<p>I&#x27;m building something similar for a friend&#x27;s wedding right now with the intention of having open to the public with features like SMS and table seating generators.

&gt;invites are not environmentally friendly<p>As opposed to the sustainability of dozens of people traveling from near and far.

If and when I get married I probably won&#x27;t take it to this extreme, but I can imagine it might be nice to use some sort of CRM to manage my communications with all the guests and wedding vendors.

i get you did this as exercise but from efficiency point it seem like waste of time just to invite around 60 people (have i got it right if 40 accepted means acceptance around 70%), I would understand if you would have few hundred guests that it&#x27;s with automating bit if you calculate your invested time compared doing it manually (send me group SMS and manually write in sheet who accepted, refused or didn&#x27;t answer) you are actually losing time<p>i wish i had such small wedding

If it hurts, do it more often so we feel the pain hard enough to justify automating. I wonder how many weddings he has gone through in his life :)

I remember working too long on the email version of my wedding invitation for those who chose to receive the electronic edition when they filled out the Gogle Form to RSVP... trying to get fancy with email formatting is such a pain! I sent out the initial &quot;Save the Date&quot; postcard by mail.

Cash bar is poor form

I&#x27;m creating a process like this at the moment for my weddings RSVP, i&#x27;m using a paper invite that will be mailed out directing guests to a simple website that posts to a Google Form and generates an calendar invite for them with the details.

Who says that romance is dead

I made a simple ruby Sinatra app using Google docs as my spreadsheet and then used Mailchimp for emails. It worked fairly well and made it easy to play with the data.

So could somebody build this please? I can already see the pricing page in front of me charging per invites and different features. I&#x27;d use it.

Has someone an idea why Twilio stocks are going &quot;sideways&quot; for months?

Hah, my sister did something not too different, she wrote a small Flask app hosted on PythonAnywhere[0] for guests to RSVP to her wedding.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pythonanywhere.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pythonanywhere.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve build the system already, now where&#x27;s my bride?

I like the general spirit of automating things, but I find the attitude behind some of this automation a little weird. The point of a lot of these courtesy &#x27;messages&#x27; (whether invites, postcards, thank you notes etc.) are that they were personal. The medium does not matter as much as the fact that they were personal, and the money spent on it matters even less, at least to me.<p>There&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>For instance, a friend wrote a script to auto reply to people who had wished him on his birthday (he wasn&#x27;t hiding it, so I didn&#x27;t have to guess that it was an auto-reply).<p>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&#x27;d have to keep clicking on More... multiple times to get back to where you left). So I&#x27;d be completely fine with him posting a common status saying Thank You to everyone.<p>But knowing that it&#x27;s a bot reply kinda took away the point of the reply, at least for me.

SMS wedding invites... this needs to be a real thing.<p>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.<p>I love this so much. I love the simplicity of it. Someone needs to set this up as a real service...<p>Upload a list of names and cell numbers...<p>Wedding tool confirms names, asks for photo so they can auto-sort photos of you.<p>Stolen from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14102182" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14102182</a> -- Wedding tool posts pictures of people who RSVP&#x27;d as solo and let&#x27;s them Tinder each other. What a brilliant idea!<p>Along with lettings singles match up... the tool could let people say who they wanted to sit next to, and who they didn&#x27;t... taking a lot of the stress off the bride for seating arrangements.<p>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.)<p>Wedding tool sends link to some pretty online invite... with some cute backstory about the couple, or just their TheKnot page.<p>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.)<p>Wedding tool figures out dinner options.<p>Wedding tool sends reminders, calendar invites, cute little pre-wedding marketing posts to generate some excitement. Polls users to share stories about the couple.<p>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.)<p>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...<p>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&#x27;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, &quot;Bro, stay with this girl... I ain&#x27;t writing invites for you ever again... you&#x27;ll die alone without her.&quot; Ha.

Good luck with that. Come back in a couple years and tell us how it went.<p>Maybe you can automate your divorce too.

See? This is the future liberals want...<p>(note: this is a joking reference to a meme.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buzzfeed.com&#x2F;juliareinstein&#x2F;this-is-the-future-liberals-want" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buzzfeed.com&#x2F;juliareinstein&#x2F;this-is-the-future-l...</a><p>Feel free to down-vote but at least realize what it is).