I couldn't find quality tips in the sea of SEO-optimized wedding planner ads, so here are some from someone with nothing to sell you. Weddings are fun, meaning 80-20 of your job is simply to remove energy suckers, like boring speeches. **Boring speeches** - **Ask everyone to send their draft speech 2+ weeks in advance to the speech owner.** Pick someone speakers don't want to disappoint, like the bride's father. - **Ruthlessly limit the number of speeches.** Anything above 3 speeches during the cocktail and ~4 speeches between the dishes starts to feel quite heavy, which isn't enough to accommodate everyone (2 sets of parents + 1 newly weds + 2 sets of brothers and sisters + 2 sets of ~4 witnesses = a minimum of 13 potential speeches). To fix this, you can limit speeches to family and witnesses only, group people together, and push some speeches to the next day brunch. - **Limit speech duration** - give people a hard limit of ~3 minutes per speech (most went over but everyone said it helped them cut things down), and only ever schedule 2 speeches back to back, and 3 if you really have to and only if the last speech is likely to be great. - **Organize rehearsals** with the speech owner. Help them focus their efforts by listing who's most likely to need help and to wait for the last minute to prepare. **Sloppy transitions, slow transitions, and starting the party late** - Large crowds have inertia. Getting silence before every speech/activity can take a good 5 minutes and moving ~150 people from the cocktail to the seater dinner takes about 30 minutes. Stacked up, slow transitions derail the planning, suck away energy, and postpone the start of the party to when everyone's too tired. - **Make a planning**, allocate time for transitions and share it all with professionals like the caterer who might have cooking time requirements and want to know what trigger (like speech no. 2 start) should be used to start the cooking process. Then get a trusted person to own the planning, such as by encouraging people to get into the dinner room, and by gathering whoever's speaking next and fetching the mics. - **Add music before every speech,** it accelerates the transition towards silence and injects energy into the room. Bonus if you let the speakers pick their own music. - **Bonus: incorporate traditions as transitions**. Our wedding mixed Polish, French, and Breton (celtic) traditions, so we asked my brother to play the bagpipes to announce the cocktail speeches, which was amazing to get silence, direct everyone's attention to the right spot, and add a ceremonial touch. Later, we used the [Polonez danse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw9q2nINj48) to lead everyone into the dining hall, which was a highlight for many and cut the transition to dinner from ~30 minutes to just 7. **Mess ups** - Where are the wedding rings? Why didn't the champagne get delivered? Weddings require hundreds of small tasks to get done, and you're likely to forget at least a few. A solution is to designate one owner per topic, which for us were: - mayor office - transport & ride sharing - church - reception (timing, speeches, etc) - reception games - brunch - photographer & videographer - Next, you need to clarify expectations. For us, these were: - Owners own the topic end to end, which includes crafting an exhaustive list of what needs to be done. This switches the responsibility make sure you shared everything with them from you to them. - Owners are responsible for making sure things get done, it doesn't imply they should do everything. Owners can delegate as much as they want as long as it's clear they can't push the blame to anyone -- it's all "on them". This especially applies to people managing contractors: part of the role is to plan risks and mitigate them. A corollary is that all owners must be from your team/family. - No co-ownership. One single owner per topic. - Everyone on your team should know who owns what. Once energy-suckers are taken care off, you can focus on trying to make the day even better. - **Help people break the ice.** There are many options: - Especially if you seat strangers next to each other, send each a short message on why! *You'll be seated next to x because you both like a and b. A few fun facts about them are x, y, and z.* - Organize an evening with all the close friends and witnesses the day before. - Ask people for fun facts about themselves in the RSVP and print those on the dining tables name tags. - Arrange car-sharing. In France people use apps like [Togetzer](https://togetzer.com/) for example. In our case we noticed most of the people who'd come by car were our parents' friends and that using a new app would create too much friction for them, so we went with Whatsapp groups. - **Send the seating plan in advance**. This eases the transition, but more importantly, it allows people to be more adventurous in meeting people during the cocktail, as too often people who know each other group together only to realize later they're also seated at the same table. For us, the message looked like this: - Good morning :) •⁠ ⁠You'll be on the table named "Paris" - table mates & location in the building on the pics •⁠ ⁠Our goal is for Ewa to walk into the church at 4pm, meaning it's best to arrive 15' early •⁠ ⁠All the logistics details are on wedding.trebaol.com •⁠ ⁠We can't wait to see you! Thank you so much for coming again! - This message came with the table seating list and a map of the dining hall: - ![[wedding tips plan.png]] - **Bring structure to the DJ.** DJs tend not to be very organized and not to spend too long trying to really understand what their clients want, meaning you'll get better results by - Organizing what you want in different playlists like - start of the party (typically oldies that older crowd will dance too), - middle of the party (typically more modern music) - end of the party (typically more intense music) - anti-playlist (include any song you hate and don't want played) - songs that are meaningful to you two and should be included no matter what, whether during the party or during transitions such as before the cake entry - cocktail - having a musical background is not always feasible outdoor but it tends to make for better cocktails because it infuses a party atmosphere and removes the social anxiety from laughing too loud. - Feel free to also share guidelines like "maximum one Disney song" - Clarifying whether you want them to accept requests from the crowd or not, knowing a better way tends to be to ask everyone for songs they'd love to danse on in the RSVP. - Ask whether it's possible to heavily lower the sound in a section of the dining room and cocktail to accommodate for grand-parents' sensitive ears. - **Arrange babysitters**. Having babies and children in the reception hall tends to be a bad idea because the music is far too loud for their sensitive ears, the presence of strollers can greatly hinder the movement of the catering staff and guests, and their parents won't enjoy the wedding nearly as much if they have to worry about warming their babies' milk, give them constant attention, etc. Several young parents told us having babysitters was a godsend and allowed them to enjoy a wedding for the first time since they became parents. Easy win! All you need is an empty room, babysitters, and to tell parents what to bring and align expectations with parents with [a document like this](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VCUG2l4wWunKGf_bOH6WIWDtgqX1RaFisuU9ovgt8tE/edit?usp=sharing). - **Consider getting heel covers** if the cocktail happens in a garden so women wearing heels don't get stuck and ruin their shoes in the grass. ## Other tips - Here's a [template document](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gM3zcbyuvEiHrh0F8f4ZR3_ZOHYde1IFxMJq7Shc7i8/edit?usp=sharing) with everything from budget to owners. It's incomplete but hopefully useful. - The wedding day will go by way too fast, so if you want to enjoy all your friends and family coming from around the world to support you, it's great organizing not only a brunch the day after but also some events the days before. - **Evaluating reception halls** - When evaluating different reception halls, request their complete pricing as many deflate the rental price only to inflate ancillary costs like charging $5/person to have napkins at the dining table. A corollary of this option price inflation is that you can both save money and raise quality by investing time in doing things yourself, like by bringing your own microphones and sound system, and by buying your own candle holders. - If you have a transition from the church to the reception hall, beware that traffic jams have derailed many wedding plannings! Especially if your wedding is on a day of start or end of holidays. - **Photographer** - When selecting a photographer, do not look at their website portfolio (which is a selection of the absolute best pictures they spend hours fine-tuning). Instead, try to find websites like mariage.net where couples review photographers by posting pictures from their wedding, which will provide a much more realistic depiction of what you'd get. - You can easily raise the quality of every single contractor starting with a photographer by taking the time to understand what they are good at and to provide them with a brief or mood board. - **First dance** - If you are not sure what to do for your first dance, there are a couple websites like [this one](https://showheroff.uscreen.io/) that provide dancing lessons you can follow from home at your own pace. - **Traditions** - A wedding is like a coding framework in that a lot of best practices and tools have been developed and refined over time. It can be overwhelming at first, but it's worth investing the time to understand all of the traditions from your culture so that you can decide which ones to keep or to modify. - **Follow the framework** - For example, in Europe, the order for speeches tends to be parents → couple → siblings → witnesses, and for each to have the bride's side speak before the groom's side. This sounds like a detail but can effectively prevent hours of ego-fueled discussions to understand who should go first. - **Add more traditions** - You can also infuse a lot of soul into your wedding by drawing from old traditions. For ours, playing celtic bagpipe (before speeches) and dancing the Polonez danse (to get into the dining room) were some of the highlights for guests. - **Update the traditions** - In France and Poland, the newlyweds are the last to enter the dining room, which they do with loud music and a lot of energy. If I could do it again, I would have loved to draw from North American traditions and enter accompanied with our witnesses and siblings.