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3 Simple Ways to Manage Your Wedding Guest List
Managing your wedding guest list and wrangling your RSVPs can be one of the most challenging parts of planning a wedding, if not the most challenging. Making decisions about who to invite is hard, and you then need to keep your guest list organized and encourage everyone to respond on time. It can be very time-consuming and you have a deadline to stick to if you want to have it all confirmed by the time your wedding date arrives. If you want to simplify the process and get your wedding guest list organized earlier, you might find that there are a few things you find helpful.
Managing your guest list doesn’t need to be difficult. If you need to make it easier, take a look at these tips to help you.
Define Your Guest List Parameters
Simply deciding who to invite to your wedding can be a struggle. There are lots of expectations of who you should invite and people you want to come, but there’s also your budget to think of. You might want a big wedding or a small one but, either way, you need to think about exactly who to invite. Firstly, set some parameters for who gets an invite and who doesn’t. You’ll most likely want to invite immediate family but how far out do you go? Do your cousins get invites? What about great-aunts? When it comes to non-family, do you want to invite colleagues or casual friends? You should also consider two big issues: children and plus-ones.
Organize Your Wedding Stationery
Sending out wedding stationery is important for your guest list planning. Some people prefer to do it all digitally but paper invites can be more noticeable. You might start with save-the-dates, which will let everyone know when the wedding is and give people a chance to say they can’t make it before you send out invites. A service like AuraPrint can make it easier to print save-the-dates, invites, and more. Set dates for when you want to send out different stationery so that you can have everything prepared and ready to go.
Set Up a Website
Even if you send out paper invites, it can be useful for both you and your guests to have a website. It can be somewhere to keep all of the essential information for your guests. You can also make it somewhere for people to RSVP if they prefer to respond online, rather than send something back by mail. If you don’t feel like setting up a whole website, you could create a social media page. For example, you could create a Facebook event page that provides all of the details of your wedding and allows people to RSVP.
Be Clear on the Details
If you want to get accurate information from your guests and ensure your guest list is organized, it’s important to be clear on the details that you provide. Your guests need to know key information such as dates and times, venues, food and drink options, and perhaps nearby accommodation options too. Being clear about the details will save you time because you won’t need to field lots of questions. It will help your guests to respond to your invites quicker too.
Be Firm on Your Decisions
It can be hard to stick to your guns when you’re inviting people to your wedding. You might have a clear idea of who you want there, but you can find that you get pressure from other people. You might have your parents trying to get you to invite family members you never see or people trying to get you to make an exception on your child-free wedding for their kids. But it’s important to be firm on your decisions and only invite the people you agree on as a couple.
Don’t Leave It Too Late
The most important thing to do when managing your guest list is not to leave anything too late. If you need to know your numbers by a certain date, make sure that’s not the date you give your guests as an RSVP deadline. Give yourself time to send out invites and to chase up any responses you haven’t received yet. Create a timeline for when you want to have certain tasks completed and when you need to have responses from your guests.
Managing a wedding list can be a little tricky when you have so many other things going on. The most important thing to do is to get organized as soon as you can.
