Wedding Planning Begins
You are engaged. Officially, the wedding planning begins. With thousands of decisions to be made, one of the first ones is to decide whether you need an Event Planner or just a Day of Coordinator. An Event Planner or a Day of Coordinator, what is the difference?
What Does an Event Planner Do?
A wedding Event Planner ibasically serves as a project manager to your wedding. She will orchestrate and design the wedding logistics. The bride gives broad input on such topics as style, food preferences, and budget, then the Planner begins to methodically create the plan. With the overall vision in place, it is the Event Planner who will make a bulk of the decisions to accomplish the plan.
What sorts of Details?
A Planner does most of the investigations and preliminary hunting of choices for a bride. They will make a short list of finalist in various categories starting with venue choices. You can’t select other vendors until you get the venue and secure a wedding date. They typically will schedule your appointments for venue tours, taste testings, and often even bridal gown fittings. One by one, the Planner adds the team of vendors and builds the details needed from each of them. Piece by piece, the various parts come together. There is always a balance of letting a bride make the pivotal choices while not overwhelming her with many of the important but more mundane decisions.
Experience Counts
Planning a wedding is so much more than planning a party at your house. With a larger budget, a multitude of decisions in areas you likely are unfamiliar with, and a broad group of various vendors to oversee, there are many working parts that demand someone with experience to oversee them. Providing input from the bride is key, but allowing a professional to refine your color palette, to create design elements from florals to tableware, and to oversee vendors and logistics means that nothing important falls through the crack. A bride often doesn’t know what she should know when it comes to planning. Beyond the need for an experienced helper, a Planner takes a huge load off of a brides task list and time needed to achieve those needs.
What Does a Day of Coordinator Do?
If an Event Planner is the project manager of sorts, then the Day of Coordinator is the facilitator or manager to make those choices a reality. The Coordinator is hands on with the vendors on wedding day; when they arrive, where they set up, and answer any logistic questions. A Day of Coordinator oversees rehearsal, then she oversees logistics all wedding day through the bride’s exit. She takes the broad plan and executes the details.
What Sort of Details?
- Vendor’s ETA
- Oversees these vendor’s responsibilities day of
- Timeline
- Procession
- Guest Management
- Fluctuating Factors day of
- Venue Guidelines day of
- Exit and Departure Details
Varying Degrees of Responsibility
Many brides avoid hiring an actual Event Planner to make thier own decisions, choices, and vision. If time constraints are not a huge issue, then with some extra guidance both by someone with experience and by enough research, this indeed is possible for many brides. There are varying degrees of complexity from one wedding to the next. If you can take on the responsibility to many of these planning decisions, then you can proceed with caution for your wedding planning. Often a Day of Coordinator can be hired to be “a bit more” than just day of needs to include additional advice, suggestions, and organizational resources to help you move forward without a planner.
Know Yourself and your situation
First step is to know yourself; your strengths, your short-coming, your stress level, and your time constraints. If you feel equipped to handle much of the planning requirements, then begin the planning process. Having a Day of Coordinator is important so that you can be the bride on wedding day and not be a manager on wedding day, yet know that your plans will be implemented. If you know that you don’t have enough extra time to do your wedding planning justice, then look for a professional who can help with all or just part of your wedding planning needs.
~ Advice from Margie