For your opening to be a success you need people to attend. Therefore, you will have to decide on the people you want to invite to your venue sir. It is quite obvious that you will be inviting family and friends. My advice would be to have some, let's call it like this VIPs at your opening. He has some ideas of VIPs for you. VIP could be your doctor, your bank consultant, local officials like a mayor or local newspapers as well as influential politicians.
For example, as I am a French expatriate living in Frankfurt, Germany, I invited the French console to come to my event. I sent her a personal invitation card per post. She responded by email saying that she's at the moment, very busy, and if she has time, she'll pass by Guess what? She was extremely busy but managed to squeeze 30 minutes in her agenda to come to my opening. That was a great surprise. I also had VIPs on my list who could not attend.
Most of them still send me a personal note to decline the invitation and wish me all the best for my opening. I believe that sending handwritten mutations shows a lot of consideration and time taken, and this touches people who receive destruction mutations. Now that you know who VIPs are, let's move to preparing and sending invitations. First, make a list of the guests whom you want to be at your opening. I believe that you can send most of them an email with the details of your invitation and make it clear that you want them to confirm their purchase. essence, I like creating a small image for the invitation in the form of a JPG file.
You can design one easily in a word processor like Word and export it as an image file. Indeed, an image file is easy to share an insert in emails. Here's an example of my invitation. I include a preview of one of my works, texts for the invitation, mentioning location, time, where they can talk and deadline to confirm their presence. Of course, my logo is present for my identity and branding purposes. For your VIPs prefer handwritten invitation or postcard, here's my design of such account.
One side of the card would contain the same information as in my previous design. On the other side of the code, I will include a recent picture of myself and rewrite a few words on why I'm inviting them. This could be that I share the same community interest, background, etc. I generally manage my invitees list in a spreadsheet. What I consider important here is flagging who your VIPs are, and track how many persons will be attending your event. Please check the associated file available for download.
As a personal rule, and sometimes in agreement with the organizer. I sent invitations three weeks before the opening. It is alright to send reminders to people who haven't responded maybe like three days before the deadline. If you are a Facebook user, you can leverage Facebook by creating a Facebook event and sharing it with your friends and your Facebook group. You can also update your blog if you have one. Lastly, you can design and distribute flyers, but I recommend to be careful.
I believe that flyers may work better in small towns or communities, but not in big ones. My experience was that I distributed 1000 fliers in over 100 locations, and it didn't yield any results. So this is a learning for me living in a city of over 150,000 inhabitants. Before we close this lecture, I would like to emphasize on setting a deadline for guests to confirm their presence. You will also need to communicate the final number of guests from your site to the location where you will be exhibiting in due time for obvious preparation reasons. Of course, there may still be cases Where you will be dealing with last minute confirmations and people who would show up without even having confirmed but then this wouldn't be minimal.