As a TO, it would be neat if we had a way to put a note or message into a declination or acceptance notification.
Libby,
We don’t have a way to do that, and it’s pretty far outside our current model - we allow users to opt-out of those notifications, meaning they may not see your custom message and you may not know that they didn’t see it. My advice would be to email the applicants directly - when a user applies to your event, their email address is available in the CSV export of applications or in the list of email addresses just above the staff list on the event page.