Millennials use Facebook Events. Parents use Paperless Post. Boomers use email. Brides use snail mail. Pirates use bottles.
But when we’re planning something, Gen Z uses Partiful.
Launched in 2020, the party-planning app makes it easy to invite people, track RSVPs, and send text blasts—all with a sugarcoated sheen. Hosts create colorful event pages with an animated lava-lamp background, plus location, date, time, instructions, and silly cover photo. Guests RSVP with one click—which unlocks the names on the guest list, a sly little incentive. Don’t you want to know: Who’s going to be there?
A 2020 pandemic innovation, Partiful’s goal is simple: Make America socialize again. “We want to make it easier to get to know friends-of-friends,” the site says—a welcome antidote to the closed off, group chat-siloed circles many of us live in today. “America is in a party deficit,” according to Ellen Cushing of The Atlantic. On an average weekend, only 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event in 2023—a 35 percent drop since 2004. And this dearth has hit young people pretty hard; this Reddit post, in which a young person asks Gen X if parties were “ever actually a thing”—captures the fun-famine better than any stat:
