Five RSVP Secrets You Need to Know
The best way to keep track of your wedding RSVP’s is to stay organized and efficient. In this post, we give your our top five tips for tracking RSVP’s to help save your time and effort for the fun parts of wedding planning!
It is always said that planning a wedding is stressful. The truth? 99% of wedding planning is fun and exciting! The stressful 1% includes keeping track of your RSVPs. Unfortunately, as much as we may love them, wedding guests are not always the best when it comes to responding to your invitation. We are sharing our tips and tricks to tracking down those RSVPs so your wedding planning process is 100% stress-free!
Years of experience in the stationery biz has taught us the RSVP secrets that you need to be using throughout your wedding planning process to ensure organization and accuracy with your RSVP guest count!
Use Your ABC's and Your 123's
When you are finished creating your guest list, number each guest row in Excel. Then write that number in pencil on the back corner of each RSVP card. This will help you keep track of RSVP cards that come back with no name on them! And yes this tends to happen a lot (sigh). This way, if a card is returned to you with no name, simply look at the number written on the back and cross check it with your guest list. You can even use a black light pen in lieu of a pencil!
Hint: When numbering your Excel guest list, do not use the row number. Instead create a whole new column with new numbers so if you add any rows, your numbering stays the same.
Organization is Excel(lent)
Before you even think about sending out invitations, you should have an excel sheet of your guest list. When the RSVPs do start coming in, you will have a central document where you can keep track of all the RSVPs you have received. This will also help with keeping track of who still needs to respond.
Going Digital
Adding an RSVP link on your website will give your guests another way to respond and make it even easier for them to RSVP! Most wedding websites have a built in RSVP option that is easy to add, so don't feel like you have to be a computer whiz to figure this one out. We recommend theknot.com and minted.com for building a wedding website with RSVP options.
Trouble with Too Much Time
When setting your RSVP cutoff date (the date by which guests should respond), do not set the date for too long after the invitation was sent. It is good to put a little bit of pressure on your guests to get their responses in on time. Giving guests any more than 6 weeks to respond will likely cause them to put it off and eventually forget to respond. The ideal response time is 3-4 weeks before your wedding.
When It Pays to Procrastinate
The unfortunate reality of wedding planning is that not all guests respond to your invitations before the RSVP date, which can create frustration when trying to tally up final guest counts, making a seating chart, telling your caterer guest count, etc. We recommend starting your seating chart two-three weeks before since, unfortunately, not all your responses will be in at the one-month mark. Creating your seating chart at two-three weeks will allow a little cushion for those last few responses to come in, and will allow you a two week cushion to track down those last pesky RSVPs.
We hope this helps you stay organized with your RSVP’s and enjoy wedding planning!