Digital invitation: gala dinner bus times and stops

It's the Thursday before the gala dinner and three people have asked the same question: what time does the bus leave, and from which corner? Organising transport in a digital invitation is one page and about ten minutes of typing. You can do it today: pick a design from the catalogue, write the two times and the pickup point, publish and send the link.

The bus is rarely the problem. The problem is that the timetable lives in a group chat, the screenshot going round is from Tuesday's version, and one guest is still certain the bus leaves from the hotel car park.

How to organise transport in a digital invitation: start with the pickup point

Choose the stop before you think about the menu. One pickup point per bus, with a landmark you can see from the street: the fountain in the square, the shelter on the corner, the pharmacy with the green cross. 'See you there' is not a pickup point. A name, a street and a time are.

• One stop per bus, chosen for what a guest can actually see from the kerb: the fountain, the shelter, the pharmacy cross.
• The street name and a map in the same text, so it opens on the phone as they leave the house.
• A stop in the middle of town rather than the car park of a hotel on the edge of it — half your guests don't know that road.
• The name of whoever is holding the list at the door, so a latecomer knows who to call.

Bus times your guests can read at a glance

Two times and one warning. Out at 7.30pm, back at 1am, and the line 'the bus does not wait' written exactly like that. The editor counts characters as you type, so you can see when a sentence has grown long enough to be skipped. Two times, one line, no paragraph.

Decide the return time before the event, not at ten past midnight. 'We'll head back when it finishes' turns into ten messages at one in the morning while the driver keeps the engine running and forty people stand on the pavement.

How many seats to book: start with the confirmations

Replies arrive inside the same invitation, in one ordered list. Count that list and book the bus with that number, not with the full guest list you started from. The RSVP questions are yours to set, so the answers come back in a form you read in one pass instead of chasing them across a chat.

When the bus, the time and the stop sit at the same link, nobody has to ask you twice.

Digital invitations for a gala dinner: the link is the transport panel

The timetable gets its own scene, next to the date and the venue, so no one has to scroll through six messages to find it. Change the departure time, the pickup point or the map and the link is already right: no reprint, no forwarding, no second screenshot in the group chat. Guests open it in the browser on their phone, nothing to install, and they can check it again from the bus itself. Start yours in Send The Joy — 29.99 EUR, one payment, editable whenever you need.