Today's Youth Advisory Post is from Liz Funk who has discovered a connection between Facebook invitations and the high number of no-shows at Gen Y parties. To contact our Youth Advisory Board directly, just email them at youthadvisoryboard at ypulse.com.

Why Won’t Gen Y-ers Go To Their Friends’ Parties?

I’ve been to more than a few parties in the past few years where the host planned for twice the number of people who actually attended. It’s a sad sight: the relatively empty living room and the host whose left asking herself, "Where is everyone?!”

At my own dinner party last winter I made reservations for the twenty-five guests who said they would attend. Eventually, twelve showed up (several of them over an hour late.) What's the problem here?

A bit of the issue may be flakiness. Generation Y is many things—motivated, involved, overachieving, and as a result, generally a bit overwhelmed. A fraction of the guests who miss parties usually offer the excuse “I’m so sorry, I completely forgot.” (I also suspect that ironically another reason young people miss events is that even though they have BlackBerries, iPhones and Palm Pilots, many young people don’t own day planners.)

And yet the real culprit behind the missing party guests may be that all of these poorly-attended soirees are organized via Facebook. It seems many people RSVP affirmatively to Facebook events and then never attend.

Part of the problem is that, when responding to an invitation for an event on Facebook, users have the option of checking “Maybe attending” which is convenient for a Facebook user who doesn’t want to have to commit to Friday night plans, but makes organizing a dinner party much more difficult for a hostess who needs to give a head count for a reservation or needs to make sure she has enough dessert for everyone.

The tenuousness of Facebook event guest lists also changes the way that companies and non-profits organize via Facebook. I’m told by a community organizer friend of mine that, when organizing over Facebook, a “Yes” for an event is actually a “maybe,” a “maybe” is a “no,” and a “no” is a “definitely not.”

Luckily, there are other more reliable ways of organizing events online. A few people I know have organized book parties via Evite and got relatively accurate head counts in advance. Could this be because Evite sends party attendees regular reminders of where they need to be and when? Facebook only puts event reminders in the sidebar of one’s profile homepage, and Facebook users are already bombarded with messages from groups and fan pages, so they’re likely to miss messages about events because they often clear their inboxes without reading anything.

My dinner party with phantom guests last semester was a touch traumatizing and I can’t say that I’ll be using Facebook to plan another party. But then again, because the restaurant reserved four tables for my party of twelve, it was the first dinner I’ve eaten out in Manhattan where my guests and I all had ample elbow room. I guess that’s not such a lose-lose after all!

P.S. Check out the latest in e-vite innovations from Paperless Post, a new online invitation service that offers a fancier selection of digital stationery. Trendcentral reports the site is still in beta, but hopes to take off soon with party planners.

About Liz Funk

Liz Funk is a freelance writer and college student. She has written for USA Today, Newsday, the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post, Girls' Life, and CosmoGIRL!, among other publications. Her first book, Supergirls Speak Out, about the pressure on girls to be perfect, will be published by Simon and Schuster in March of 2009. She writes a blog for the Albany, NY newspaper the Times Union and she edits the teen culture and politics blog GirlHeadQuarters.org. She is a senior at Pace University and lives in Manhattan. Her web-site is www.lizfunk.com.

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