Home: Birthday invitations :: surprise birthday invitations

How to Deliver Surprise Birthday Invitations

If you're planning a surprise party, and you have a lot of people to invite, you may find yourself wondering about how to get the invitations to the intended recipients. By "surprise birthday invitations," we don't always mean standard cards with YOU ARE INVITED printed across the front - we could also mean invitations that are dealt over the phone, or over email.

There is a not-so-simple trick to delivering surprise birthday invitations: be underhanded. If you're making a standard card invitation, don't go by the conventional route, which is by post or by simply handing them out. Try to make your delivery discreet, so that the celebrant doesn't risk finding the cards and knowing about the gathering beforehand.

In this day and age, however, card invitations for surprise birthday parties has become quite outmoded. You could be more inventive with email and word-of-mouth. There are some significant risks with email, however - if the person you're planning to stage a celebration for is your boss, for example, and one who has access to all employee emails, don't put it past him or her to snoop into your internal correspondences! Also, if the celebrant is someone who lives in your household, who has access to your computer, you have to be really careful to delete all evidence of having sent any suspicious emails. Otherwise, they might not even have to snoop for the information: they might come across it quite by accident! This may well be one of the most convincing arguments for never leaving sensitive files or correspondence records on your desktop (and if we're talking about surprise birthday invitations, those certainly qualify as "sensitive" data!).

Word-of-mouth is a tried and tested method. However, you must also be discreet with this. You shouldn't bring up the invitation at all anywhere near the vicinity of the celebrant, so you should make the extra effort to take the prospective partygoers aside and tell them the details! Ask about the best way to keep in touch with them as well, in case you will need to contact them (and vice versa) for emergency schedule changes and other things. Of course, the best thing to do is to plan your party weeks ahead, so you have time to meet with everyone and discuss the party plans.