Guides

Welcome to the Orbit way of building a high-quality list of people to invite to your next event. In this playbook, you’ll learn a repeatable process to build invite lists based on a few tried-and-true principles. It works for in-person, virtual, and hybrid events.

This process will save you time and help get the best people to your events. It will also help you track everything in Orbit, which comes in very handy when doing other things like sending invitations, tracking registration, and doing post-event reports.

By following the playbook, you’ll get:

There are a million ways to build an invite list. How you do it depends on your goals and what you care about, i.e. your values. Here are some of the principles I use.

🌀 Use the Orbit Model

I also lean on the Orbit Model to help me think about the purpose of the event and the mix of attendees I want there. Here are a few questions I ask:

Before you start building your invite list, think about the purpose of your event and write it down. This will make all the following steps easier. Remember, purpose is your bouncer.

General

Logistics

Attendees

Next, we’ll build your event invite list in Orbit. To create our invite list, we’ll use Orbit Lists.

To build an invite list effectively, I start with the most essential invites and work my way outward. Here’s the model I use. No surprise, it’s a lot like the Orbit Model.

The smallest circle is the core group of attendees and people who play other roles like speaking or sponsoring. Without them, no event happens, so I focus energy here first.

Since I generally know all of these folks by name, there is usually no filter I can use to make it easy to bulk-add them to my list. I will instead add them one by one by doing the following:

Repeat this process for each person.

Examples of these people include:

This circle is for ideal general attendees. These aren’t people I expect to play any specific role. I just want them to come, meet people, learn something, and have fun.

Unlike folks in the Must Attend category, I may not know who they all are yet. So I will use member filters to identify a good group and bulk-add the ones that make sense to my invite list. I will use the following steps:

So what are examples of people that would be in the should-attend category? It can be a variety of things and depends heavily on the event. Here are a few criteria I use.

In this step, we can broaden our search. First, check how many members are in your list so you can see if you need to invite more. You’ll find the total number of members in your list at the bottom right corner of the list.

Based on that number, you can decide if you need to expand the list or not. E.g. if you want 50 people at the event, and expect a 25% response rate to invitations, you’ll want to have at least 200 people on the list.

To add more people, follow the same process as step 2b. The only difference is the criteria that you use to filter by. You can try different combinations to find interesting people, or lower the eligibility requirements. Just be sure to keep Quality over quantity in mind to ensure the best event.

By now, you should have a solid invitation list. Congrats! The next step is inviting people. I will share a bit about how my process works.

Every invitee goes into one of two buckets:

Personal invitation

For Must-attend members and some Should-attend members, I will reach out 1:1 with a personal message on whatever channel I usually communicate with them on.

Batch invitation

For most Should-attend members and Could-attend members, I will collect their emails and use a mail campaign tool like GMass or Mailchimp to send an invitation. Alternatively, I will upload the emails to my event registration tool and do the invitation from there.

For either bucket, if I do not have an email for the person in Orbit, I will try to find one and add it, or I will try another platform for outreach like Twitter, Discord, or Slack.

Orbit can help with this process by giving you a CSV export of all the members with the event tag. First, head to the members table and filter to the event tag.

Select all the members using the checkbox and Select All option. Then click Export CSV.

My next step is to load the CSV into a Google spreadsheet. This can be done by creating a new Google sheet and using the import function to upload the CSV. I will add a column to my spreadsheet based on what type of invitation each member should get - personal or batch.

Here’s an example Google Spreadsheet that shows an Orbit member CSV export side-by-side with the tracking columns I use. Feel free to duplicate and use it, customized to your own needs.

For the personal outreach folks, there’s no shortcut, I’ll just work through each message and make sure I have the right contact info. I’ll have some snippets in my notes that I can copy and paste from to cut down on some of the work.

For the batch outreach folks, I’ll grab the ones with emails and paste them into a campaign tool. For the remaining ones, I’ll mark them as No email and go through that list manually afterwards, trying to find other ways to contact them.

Once the invitations go out, the next important steps are to track RSVPs and to record registrations and attendance in Orbit. Having the data in Orbit will allow you to easily work with the list of attendees and to do post-event reporting.

What if the member I’m looking for doesn’t exist in Orbit?

If you search and do not find the person, they might not be in your Orbit workspace yet. That’s okay, we can add them.

How do I track event attendance so that I can filter for members that have gone to past events?

If you have not been tracking attendance historically, you can still go back and add activities manually that represent attendance. Follow the guide to see how.

Note: if you want to filter for one or more specific events, you would need to use activity properties. Properties allow you to record pieces of information on the activity, for example the name or id of the event it pertains to. 🚧 The playbook for tracking event registration will have information on how to set this up.

Could I use a workflow to automatically add members to my event list?

If you’d like to have new members who match your invite criteria be continuously added to your invite list, then a workflow is the way to go. This might be useful for bigger events that you are running that have more lead time. However, please be aware that this could reduce invite list’s quality if the filter is too broad. Learn more about how to set up a workflow here:

I’m throwing another event for similar people, do I have to repeat the whole process?

No. You can actually re-use your hard work by working off of your list of previous invitees. To do this, first go to your old list and add a tag everyone in that list (like Event-Paris-Oct-2022 Invitees). Head to the members table, filter to that tag, and select everyone. Click Add to List and create a new list. This will add everyone with from the past event invite list to the new one.