With the continued growth of concertsinyourhome.com, we are adding a lot of artists and presenters who are somewhat new to house concerts. Some may be still be planning their first event. Once an artist and host have agreed on the basic details, what should a host put in their invitations? It’s something I’ll expand on in a later post, but for now I’ll share an email I just sent to a presenter/friend who is hosting a house concert with me for the first time.

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(Jill agrees on a date, time, and donation amount for a show, and I reply.- fs)

sounds great, Jill.

Here’s a rough email you can tweak and send to everyone you know. 8^)

Fran Snyder will be doing a very special house concert here on Sunday, October 28th. He’s an artist based in Lawrence, KS, and will be doing just a few shows in the Bay Area on a short California tour. Fran’s music is groovy, acoustic pop with a lot of soul and humor. This will be a very intimate performance, just him and his guitar, telling stories and singing some great songs.

You can hear his latest, live CD right from the front page here - http://fransnyder.com

Plan to arrive at 5:30, and the show will start at 6pm. Fran will do two sets and we should be done by 8pm. If you’ve never heard of “house concerts”, it’s a wonderful trend that is happening all over the country. (see http://concertsinyourhome.com)

Please RSVP as soon as you can to j……w@yahoo.com, as we are limiting the audience to 25 people. We’ll also be collecting a $10 donation per guest to help with Fran’s travel expenses. Bring a few extra bucks to take home a CD as well, you’ll be glad you did.

— this is where her email/invitation would end, signed Jill, etc… but my email to her continues…

Less is more on the initial email to your friends, but for those that reply - you can also talk about food/refreshments, if you want people to bring a snack, a dish, or a bottle. You might also recommend parking info, etc…

Finally, it’s wise to take extra RSVPs, because you can usually count on 20-30% of the people to back out at the last minute or not show up. Life happens. 8^)

I promise you it will be a lot of fun. Keep me posted!

Fran

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Email is a convenient way to send out invitations (don’t forget your neighbors!), but there are also some great tools to send online invitations. Evite is extremely popular, and allows you to dress things up a bit.

That’s all for now, but please feel free to comment if there are any tips you’d like to add. I’ll consider them for a more comprehensive post on this subject later.

Best,

Fran Snyder
http://fransnyder.com