Experience has taught us that Stitch members — and in particular, new members — are more likely to attend an in-person Stitch activity if they receive a direct message from the organizer, instead of simply seeing a notification from Stitch.

For this reason, many of our most proactive Community Champions often manually send personal invitation messages to members in their areas, each time they are hosting an activity.

We love seeing this happen, but we know it's extremely time-consuming, and isn't something that all event organizers have the time to do — or indeed, even think to do in the first place.

That's why we introduced the ability for event organizers to set up an automatic personal invite when they create an event on Stitch.

Stitch will send this personal invite as a direct personal message to up to 30 members in your local area. Some of them won't be interested in attending, and we have designed the system so you won't hear from them. But some will be interested, and will reply to your message. Even if they can't make it to this particular event, they can let you know they may attend the next one.

Hey, presto! You've got an additional attendee for your upcoming events, and a potential new best friend.

We can't send a personal invite to every single member in the area each time an event is published (as that would quickly overload every Stitch inbox) so Stitch selects members to send your invite to based on a range of factors, such as how far away they live from the event, how responsive they are, how many events they have attended recently, and how many other invitations they have received recently.

You are always free to send out manual messages to more people if you wish; the automatic personal invitation just makes it a lot easier for you to do so without putting in any effort. We hope you give the feature a try and let us know what you think!