Wedding Planning 001 : Guest List & Wedding Invites!

Once the wedding dates are fixed, before you make all the other arrangements the most important thing to do is prepare you wedding guest list. I remember my pre-wedding days, Parents had a separate list of their friends and relatives; same with my siblings. It took a lot of time and energy to coordinate with every one and prepare a proper guest list. In fact, I didn’t get a chance to search for applications, gadgets which could help me in managing my wedding invitations. Now, there are enough and more options, but we would like to give you some smart tips, So your learn from the mistakes I made and make use of your time effectively!

Preparing the Wedding Guest List:

Once the Wedding date is fixed, the guest list preparation should start and for this you need inputs from relatives also. To make this part simple, let us split this task. For example if you are the bride’s family then list looks like the one below:

Bride’s wedding Guest List prepared should include people whom she would like to invite. Same way, bride’s brother, sister etc can make their own list (of course with the approval of the bride as its her wedding). Senior members of the family should provide the list of family members who need to be invited. Once all individual lists are ready, prepare the Master Wedding Guest List. By doing so, there is very less probability to miss someone who is supposed to be invited. Also, When the Master Wedding Guest list is prepared using the individual lists, duplication chances are less like sending multiple invites to same person. Now this is pretty simple way and no gadget is required for preparing list. A better way is use an excel sheet, which can be filled by different persons and prepare final guest list from that.

You can also use some applications for preparing guest lists. Google itself is providing everything for planning wedding here http://www.google.co.in/weddings/. You can also go for wedding planner applications which can be installed on smartphones. Google Play store, Apple Itunes store etc have plenty of applications for these purposes.

Wedding Invite:  The next step is inviting the guests. Here we can go for any of the below options.

Classic Way – The Wedding Cards:

Traditional invitations are wedding cards. You can select a card with the design and details of the function. These can be delivered using postal facility or courier. Other than just the wedding card, calling the guest using phone and reminding them about the marriage is also a good thing to do. Then there are few special guests whom we need to go physically and invite. The physical invite need to be planned as it takes a day or more from your tight wedding schedule. This can be done by sorting out the list route wise and going and inviting them.

Smart Way – Online Wedding Invites:

The easiest of the lot, not feasible for all though. We can save time, money & manage invites easier by doing this online. This way it is easy to invite people who are staying at distant places or different countries also. For this, create a Wedding site with necessary details about the bride, the groom, the family, the story and what not. There are lots of sites available which are free for creating wedding invites. Email the people to be invited with the wedding site link (URL). People can RSVP and respond.

A smarter way is to use social networking sites for inviting the guests. Social networking site Facebook is a good example. Create a Facebook event for the Wedding and invite people using that event invite. The Wedding site URL can be integrated in the Facebook Event. Depending on the number of RSVP responses, we will get an approximate number of guests who are going to attend the wedding. This will help in budgeting, arranging food, transportation, accommodation etc.

The above ways are based on our personal experiences . Other than these, we can use Smart Phone applications to plan the wedding, invites etc. There are lots of applications for the same in Google Play Store, Itunes store etc.

Watch out for more tips from us on guest management..

Team knotstory~~