Recommendations

Planning a wedding can get busy and messy, so there are quite a few recommendations I have for someone who may not be the most organized person to begin with. There are many different 12 month wedding planners and organizers out there, some made by The Knot, and some that you can even find at Walmart or any other stores. These planners can help you remember things you may not have been thinking about, or didn’t even know you had to do. They give you checklists, timelines, outlines, and different formats of how you should be writing out seating charts, lists, etc. With these planners, you can become one of the most organized people overnight! They are that simple and helpful!

Another recommendation I have is the service of an actual wedding planner. I am a wedding planner at a rental and wedding coordinating company, and I help brides do all sorts of things. I not only help them, I actually do most of the actual work. They will send me all of their contracts from their vendors, and I will organize them and put them into a specific folder for a later date when I begin creating the wedding timeline. These vendor contracts are just a small piece of the information I receive from brides.

The types of information I receive varies from what types of things we will be using to reserve seats, to the minute a bus will arrive. A wedding planner takes care of it all for you, and all you need to do is communicate back and forth with them. The perk is that you will be mostly stress-free, and can just gather all of the information from each vendor, and bring all of that jumbled information to the wedding planner, and they will sort through it and make sure it is all in an organized manner for that special day.

Once a wedding planner receives any sort of information about the day, they will begin to create a wedding timeline. A wedding timeline is a basic step by step of the day planned out to the minute. The wedding planners want to know any and all information the bride has for their special day so that they know how to assist, and where to assist at. Since they will be the point of contact throughout the entire day, they need to know when the florist will be arriving, what the photographer’s phone number is, what time the entertainer will begin to tear down at the end of the night, etc.

These things are very important since the planner will be communicating what will be happening throughout the day with these different vendors. They are in constant contact with this timeline, and it usually is very accurate and can be followed throughout the whole day. With all of the weddings I have attended in working as a wedding planner and coordinator, the timeline has helped everyone stay on track. It shows when photos will be taken by the photographer, who will be in those photos, and what types of photos will be taken. For instance, after the ceremony if the bride and groom are going to get their pictures taken with family, the planner will need to know the names of the family members that will be taking pictures with them, and the different sets of pictures that will be taken. The reason this needs to be known is because the planner is the person planning the entire day and making sure everything goes smoothly. If the bride and groom were supposed to be taking pictures at 3:00 and it is now 3:15 and nobody from the family is with the bride and groom, then the planner would have to find the people that were in the list the bride sent over, and direct them of where to go.

Things like this are a lot smoother with a wedding planner because without them, the bride may be stressing out a little more than she may want. The planner makes sure that every vendor that will be involved in the wedding has a copy of the timeline so every single person is on the same page. Another perk is that the timeline will have the lists of songs that will be played and when, and this can help out the DJ to make sure that they play the right songs at the right time. If they are on the same page as the planner, it will help them both with the flow of guests, whether they need to start heading to the ceremony or reception, or line up the bridal party to start the processional.

A wedding planner essentially does exactly what you would do if you chose it use a wedding planner booklet that you can buy at the store. The biggest plus of using an actual coordinator would be to reduce the amount of stress that is put on the bride on her special day. If something does go wrong, or not as planned, the planner would make sure to get the issue fixed right away without even having to contact the bride, so she would never know that there was a problem in the first place. The last thing you want during your wedding day is to be told that something was wrong.

One instance I have seen in the weddings I have attended as a coordinator is that the bakery did not show up with the cake in time. The time had gone and went when we had expected them to come, so we took the liberty in calling them, and turned out that they had it on their schedule wrong and didn’t think to check their emails again and confirm the date in advance, so they had to rush and make sure they could get the cake to the reception in time. Luckily, we had the phone number and contact information for them, and took care of it. The cake arrived in time, and the bride had no idea of the mishap we had to go through.

There are many perks to using the service of an actual wedding planner, but if you do not have the amount of money in your budget for one, the different types of wedding 12 month planners that are out there for you to purchase are a cheaper alternative if you want to plan your wedding completely on your own!

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