User stories:

As an organizer, I want to be able to easily send invitations to a bulk of users who are likely to be interested in my event, so that more people can join my events and make impactful contributions on the wikis.

As a product analyst, I want to be able to know exactly which organizers sent invitations and who they sent the invitations to, so that I can then compare those stats against registration rates to determine if certain types of events have higher success with Invitation Lists or if certain changes should be made to the model to make it more impactful.

User problems:

Organizer problem: Right now, organizers receive a list of people who are recommended to invite from Invitation Lists (user guide and project page). However, organizers do not have easy next steps after they receive the invitation list. They may wonder: What do I do with this information? If I want to invite people, how can I go about doing this? What should I even say in the message? And should I just invite everyone in the list, or is there some guidance on how I make that decision? Overall, there are a lot of questions that are left for organizers to figure out on their own. We want to remove a lot of that burden on the part of the organizer by providing simple, clear next steps that result in invitations being sent to users. This way, they will be more likely to a) send invitations at all, and b) send invitations that are compelling and inspiring to the people who they invite. The end goal will ideally be that more people then register for their events.

Analytics problem: We currently do not have a great way of tracking the impact of Invitation Lists for specific events or overall. Unlike our pilot experiment, in which we knew exactly who organizers invited (which we could compare to registration lists), we only know if an organizer generates an Invitation List. We do not know if a) they choose to actually invite people, and b) who they invite. This leaves an analytics dead-end. However, if we provide support to organizers to send messages, then we can have a more clear picture of all of the steps they took and we can actually develop analytics that find the success rates of invitations (i.e., what % of those who were invited registered for the event?). With this data, we can see if there are improvements that we want to make to the Invitation List model over time to make it more effective.

Background:

Invitation Lists is a feature that allows organizers to generate a list of users who are recommended to invite to their event. It is available to users who have the Event Organizer right on wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled. The Invitation List is generated when a user goes to Special:GenerateInvitationList. A given invitation list is viewable on the Special:InvitationList page. Past invitation lists are viewable via Special:MyInvitationLists.

How this could work:

As next steps, we have learned from organizers during our pilot experiment with the tool that they would like a way to a) select participants to invite, b) have the option to add other users who are not in the participant list, c) be able to send mass emails to users, and d) have a template invitation message that they can edit. This way, they can easily take action after they have received an invitation list with the goal of increasing participation in their organized activities.

We are choosing mass email over talk page messages because mass talk page messages is a right (MassMessage). However, we could look into integrating this flow into MassMessage in the future, potentially, if there is interest and a need.

Notes:

• Perhaps to start within the confines of what is allowed in the code, we can allow all organizers, regardless of their rights, to send 20 invitations via email per day? This means we will also need to inform the user about the limitations so they can make the best decisions on who to invite.
• Perhaps we want to use a similar UI as that for organizers sending emails to participants via Event Registration. Just note that an organizer can use Invitation Lists without using Event Registration. See screenshot below:

Past work:

In the early stages of planning the Invitation Lists project (which was formerly called 'Event Invitations'), we did not yet know if we what fit into the scope of the MVP. For this reason, @gonyeahialam developed some design concepts that also included an email feature. So, I think it may be helpful to also look at what was previously developed since it may provide some helpful guidance. We may want to update the design concepts, since the product has evolved since those initial designs, but they can be considered a helpful resource. For examples, you can see T348779#9265417 and scroll down to comments below for some more ideas developed by Gregory.