Company open day invitations: hours, doors and slots

You send the company open day invitations on a Monday. By Wednesday you are answering the same question again: is it still 12:00? One person wants to come at four instead. Another asks which entrance to use. On the morning itself you are typing directions at the door while the first group waits in the car park for someone to walk them in.

None of that is a guest problem. It is a planning problem. Decide the route, the slots and the door before anyone is invited, and put the replies somewhere that keeps itself up to date.

Company open day invitations: draw the route first

An open day is not a party with a start time. It is a route: reception, a walk through the floor, a demo, coffee, out. If visitors do not know where they are going, your team spends the morning pointing at corridors instead of talking to anyone. Sketch the path before you sketch the invitation, and be honest about the size of the room. A meeting room with twelve chairs is not a room for a group of thirty, however many can stand.

• A time slot with a start and an end — three clear blocks beat 'come whenever you like'.
• The exact entrance, with something you can see from the street: Entrance B, by the bike racks, ask for Julia.
• How long the walk takes, and whether there are stairs or long stretches on your feet.
• A named contact, plus a photo of the team on the cover, so nobody has to be called over the loudspeaker.

Your numbers come from a question, not the door

Set the RSVP questions with the slots you can actually run: 10:00, 12:00, 16:00. The confirmations arrive inside the same invitation, in one ordered list, so you can see who is in each block. Ask how many people each guest is bringing, too. If the 12:00 block fills up, you know before the chairs come out and the coffee is on.

The invitation collects the answers. You still decide who goes where — it sorts the replies, it does not make that call for you. Reading one list takes five minutes; chasing the same people by message takes a morning.

Decide the route, the slot and the door first. Then send one link that keeps showing the right answer.

When the hour or the door changes, the link stays the same

If the 12:00 slot moves to 12:30 on Tuesday, you edit the invitation and the link you already sent still works. Nobody gets a new message, and nobody has to work out which of three emails is the current one. Same with the entrance: if building work means everyone comes in through the courtyard, you change the text and the map, and whoever opens the link that morning sees the new version.

Write it for someone who has never been to your building

'Come to our office' helps nobody who has never been there. Give the door, the bell and the name of the person who meets them. Use a real dress code instead of 'smart casual': being received in an industrial unit and being received in an office with a press visit and a team photo are not the same. If your team works in more than one language, the invitation content can be set per language — German and English, say — without duplicating the link or starting a second list of confirmations. A handful of printed copies for the management folder is fine; the rest of the list does not need an envelope, a stamp or a handwritten address.

Pick a design, try the cover for free, and publish the link once the route, the door and the slots are clear. Guests open it in a browser, with no app to install, and reply from their phone. It costs €29.99, paid once — and it is still the same invitation when you change the hour.