Our culture downplays the importance of a great party. Partying is core to our social fabric. Human beings need to get out of the house and interact with people. Parties are a golden opportunity to meet new and old friends in a comfortable, intimate environment. But parties are rare. Great parties are exceptionally rare. So if you’re going to host a party, you may as well do it right.
Parties vs. Pregames
To be clear, we’re not talking about pregames. We’re not talking about hangouts or kickbacks. We’re talking about parties. There’s two main differences:
1. Peripheral Invites
In general, parties have larger invite lists than pregames. If you have a pregame, you might throw the invite to a few people you know. With parties, you can invite people who are more peripheral to your circle of friends. These are people who are just outside of your core group. You might not hang out with them all the time, but it’s good to catch up in the right occasion.
2. Feel of Formality
Parties have a clear invite list that’s sent out further in advance. 2 weeks out is a good rule of thumb. The larger the party is, the farther out invites should be sent whereas pregames can be organized the night of. Alcohol / food is provided at a party but not always at a pregame. Invites are more formal for a party. It’s unusual to get a pregame invite any way other than a simple text.
Why Host: The Benefits
There’s a ton of benefits to hosting parties. First, you completely control the environment. Hate going to nightclubs with questionable music, drinks, and people? Curate a playlist of your favorite songs for your party. Make spiked punch with fresh fruit and that Icelandic vodka you love. Invite people you genuinely want to catch up with. You remember Build-A-Bear Workshop? Hosting a party is like Build-A-Bar. Your party is a destination event venue where you’re the bouncer, bartender, DJ, and owner.
Hosting a party is the closest thing to feeling like a celebrity. You gain immediate status. It’s an unspoken rule that guests must be kind to party hosts. If you’re not, you don’t get invited later on. You’ll find that if you host, guests pile on the praise. And it’s somewhat valid. When you host, you’re creating immense value for your guests. Without you, they’d be doing something other than being at a party. Which is to say they’d be doing something almost certainly worse. As the host, you also get to see your guests interact and make new introductions. There’s a particular joy in watching your friends become friends.
Party Goals
Before you throw a party, you need a plan. Define what you want out of this party. A couple questions to get you started:
- Is this party during the day or night? Indoors or outdoors?
- How long do you want people to be at your place/venue?
- Is there somewhere you want to go after? How are you going to get there?
- How many people do you want to show up? How many do you want to invite?
- What kind of vibe do you want: laid-back, chatty, dancey?
- Any theme or dress code?
- Are you going to provide drinks or food?
Where to Host
We’ve now covered the What. Now we just need the Where and the How. If you have your own place, hosting is easy: you’re in a comfortable environment and don’t have to go anywhere. But there’s no rule saying you have to host parties at your place. My friend plays popup DJ sets in bars around SF and has all his friends show up (@wwwnewnostalgia). I’ve had friends ask to host at my place and vice versa. If you ask someone if you can host at their place, pay them back in kind. A nice bottle of liquor or dinner should do the trick. Then help clean up afterward.
Invites
As a host, you control the guest list. If you don’t like someone, don’t invite them. Inevitably you’ll have people who you want to invite but don’t get along together. Not your problem, invite them all anyway. If they want to come bad enough, they will. For any event greater than 10 people, it’s almost impossible to get 100% attendance. 60% attendance for larger parties is a solid turnout.
If people aren’t showing up at your parties, there’s a couple reasons:
- You sent invites out too late
- You don’t have enough social pull / connection with your invitees
- They don’t like your other invitees
- They had other stuff going on (which usually means you sent invites out too late)
“The medium is the message.”
– Marshall McLuhan
To get people to your parties, you need a way to communicate your event. There’s a couple ways I’ve seen party invites handled:
Facebook Events
Most party invites I sent or received in college were through Facebook Events. The biggest benefit of Events is you don’t need your attendees’ phone numbers to invite them, just their Facebook. This helps in school, where you have a ton of peripheral people to hit up. The downside with Events is your invitees need a Facebook profile or have to check Facebook at the right time to see the invite. I know many people who don’t have or check Facebook. They’ll miss out on events by not knowing. Facebook used to have a feature to know who’s seen your event invite and not yet responded. Back then, it was typical for me to have 10-20 people who didn’t see the invite I sent out.
Paperless Post / Evite
I’ve recently gravitated toward digital invite apps. Paperless Post and Evite are two of the most popular options here. These platforms don’t make your invitees download a separate app to see your invite, they’ll receive a text with the invite link and an email confirmation upon RSVP. Digital invites allow you to track RSVPs and check who’s seen your invite. They add a level of legitimacy to the invite that a text or Facebook invite can’t convey.
I prefer Paperless Post to Evite since their design templates are super crisp. You can buy coins for more customization. I also don’t like that Evite shows your invitees who responded Maybe / No to your event. Paperless Post only shows invitees who responded Yes. This is a subtle advantage for you as the host, you want people to focus on who’s coming rather than who’s not. If an invite shows 30 people said Yes but 60 people said No, it’s hard not to wonder, “Well, what are they doing instead?”
Texts
You can always text people to come to your party but text invites come across more casual than FB events or Evites. If you’re going this route, send personal feeler texts to each person and then a mass text with those interested. Read my last post for more detail on this strategy when getting groups together.
Alternatives
There are a couple other ways to send invites in the digital age. I’ve seen shared iCloud notes with event details where attendees mark their name if they’re going. The good thing about this method is it forces your attendees to opt-in to the party. Writing your name down on a shared note carries more weight than clicking Going on a Facebook Event. Still, this method only works if all your friends have iPhones.
Another common option is sending invites through GroupMe. GroupMe has a decent lightweight feature for capturing RSVPs. But GroupMe suffers the same downside as Facebook Events, your invitees need the app and must check it at the right time. I’ve missed multiple parties because I rarely check GroupMe.
Gathering Responses
With party invites, there’s two obvious responses: Yes or No. Be grateful for those who say Yes, they made time in their busy schedule to come to your event. People who say No to your event are doing you a favor, your party forecast is now more accurate. Saying No to an event may seem kind of awkward because it feels so final and cutting. Yet it’s so much better than the alternative: saying Maybe or saying nothing. Again, it’s better to say No to a party invite than to say Maybe. If you say No then change your mind, simply update your RSVP within a reasonable time frame. You want your invitees to RSVP with complete conviction. Hell Yes or Hell No. Anything else is useless. When you receive an invite, you should give a clear answer to the host on your intention to attend.
A Maybe is a weak Yes. It’s a Yes with strings attached. Responding Maybe says “I’m interested in this party (as long as something better doesn’t come up)”. Have I responded Maybe to party invites before? Probably. But it’s a faux pas that decreases your connection with the person hosting. A lack of response is a weak No. Giving no response is itself its own response. When people don’t respond to your events, you should re-evaluate whether you’ll invite them to events going forward. They’re probably trying to be polite by not saying No. But really it means you aren’t close enough for them to send you a No. The caveat is that sometimes people don’t respond because they haven’t seen the invite, which is why the platform you use for invites is so important.
Party Setup
Clean + Arrange
The setup of your place is an underappreciated factor in party planning. Guys tend to overlook this. I tagged along to a friend of a friend’s “pregame” a little while ago. I opened the door and my nose was smacked with the smell of weed and wet dog. In the living room, five guys were lazing on the couch watching baseball. Calling this a pregame was sacrilege. Every inch of the apartment was a mess: overloaded trash bags on the floor, pans of soggy scrambled eggs filling the sink, empty toilet paper rolls in the bathroom. They may have meant well but these guys had zero sense of hospitality. Or negative hospitality. As the party host, you must prep your place for guests. If your place looks like garbage, that reflects poorly on you. It means you can’t take care of yourself or your environment.
The French have a concept in fine dining: mise en place. Everything in it’s right place. The kitchen is cleaned and scrubbed down every night. Ingredients are cut into correct portions. Everything is arranged so chefs can begin cooking with no obstacles. Like a quality restaurant, you need to prime the environment for people. If you can’t clean your place, don’t have people over. It really doesn’t take long to do this, so there’s no excuse.
Once your place is cleaned, optimize it for the party. Bring chairs out. Put food / drink out. Open up the space for people to move around, put their drinks down. If you want to play drinking games, you’ll need a table out. Think through how you want people to move through the space and interact with each other. Almost every house party I’ve attended began with people gathering in the kitchen area. People want to convene in a snug space where they can mingle and soak up the party vibe. Other rooms are less conducive for chatting since they’re more spread out.
Party Music
No one wants to go to a silent party. Find a playlist or two you can play in the background. Here’s a couple playlists that’ve helped me with my parties:
- When the sun’s shining and beer’s flowing: Summer Heat
- When friends are coming over for a cozy potluck: Feel Good Dinner
- When you can’t think of what to play: you’re in charge of aux at a party
- When people start taking shots: 20 Gold Party Anthems
Get some nice speakers and set them in a central location. Be conscious of how loud your music is or you may end up with a noise complaint. I realized I often get sucked into playing DJ when I host rather than enjoying my party. Much better to put a playlist on than to be stuck on aux the whole night.
Party Timeline
Before
A day or two before your party, gather all supplies (alcohol, food, ice, cups). The day of, clean and optimize your space. It’s not a bad idea to send a reminder message to your attendees. You can safely assume that most people will show up 30 minutes to an hour late so don’t stress about when / if people will show up. The amount of fun you have at a party isn’t determined by the size of the event. You can have an amazing time with a few friends, the vibe will just be more chill and intimate.
During
Your party is a mini-world you’ve created with wonderful people and experiences that will exist for a brief, fleeting moment and then vanish forever. It feels like you’ve pulled something together out of thin air so savor every moment while it lasts. Watch people laugh and chat and dance. Revel in the fact that you helped put on an incredible event. Take photos so you can remember years later. Often, I feel bad for party hosts as they’re the ones least likely to enjoy their party. When you’re running around trying to make sure everything’s perfect, you miss out.
When it’s time, there’s a couple ways you can kick people out. For the passive-aggressives, start cleaning the place. If you want to take a nod from the Indian community, start offering coffee / tea. Otherwise, just tell people to get out so you can go to sleep.
After
People fuss about hosting parties because your place might get messed up. This is such a lame excuse. I’ve never taken more than an hour to clean my place after a party. When you die, you won’t think about all the time you spent cleaning. You’ll think about how much fun it was getting people together.
Attending Parties
If your social life is a priority and you’ve got nothing going on, you shouldn’t be turning down party invites. When in doubt: go to the party, leave if it sucks. There’s nothing wrong with dipping out early. Tell the host thank you when you leave or shoot them a text after.
There’s two types of party attendees: value givers and value suckers. It might take a while to find out who’s who but they surely exist. You want to be in the former camp, creating and giving value. This doesn’t mean you need to be the life of the party. Creating value is about making sure the people around you are having a good time. Ask yourself how this party could be made better and then do that thing. Value comes in a lot of forms. It could be bringing alcohol or food. It could be DDing for the night. It could mean proposing a drinking game when people are sitting around awkwardly.
This is as opposed to value suckers. If you’re showing up to parties with no alcohol and a group of random dudes, you’re taking value away from the party. Out of respect for the host, you should always ask if it’s okay to bring people to their event. People who take value from your parties should be cut from future events. This could mean people starting fights. It could mean doing drugs on your fancy dining table. Maybe drinking all your alcohol and never hosting anything. Our relationships with others are balanced by a rule of reciprocity, a system of social debits and credits. When one side of that equation gets too out of whack, the relationship is strained. No one wants to be friends with someone who’s constantly taking from them.
Final Thoughts
The world would be a better place if everyone threw a party once a year. But that isn’t the case and sadly it never will be. People shy away from hosting because it requires effort, energy, and money (like all things worthwhile). I mentioned earlier how rare parties are. We’re only given a few acceptable reasons to celebrate: birthdays, graduations, holidays, weddings. You don’t need a reason to celebrate. Throw the party anyway.