Wedding planners can help you in many ways and can plan as much or as little of your wedding or civil ceremony celebration as you like.
I caught up with Hannah, from Green Soul Weddings. Hannah helps couples plan their dream day in a more environmentally conscious way. Here is what she had to say about the ways in which a wedding planner can help couples...
1. Saving Time
"When it comes to planning your wedding, it can easily feel like you’ve taken on a new full-time job in addition to your pre-existing day-to-day work and family commitments.
For some the organisational challenge and excitement ensues, and they love the whole process of planning their own wedding, whereas for others the planning gets squashed into every spare minute they can find, taking the place of things they used to enjoy doing - and quickly becomes a chore and unexciting process.
Definitely not what the journey to married life should look like!
For those of you living super busy lives and daunted by the prospect of finding time to plan your wedding on top of everything else, wedding planners offering full-planning services might just be your new best friend. We are here to put the hours in so you don’t have to.
Your wedding planner will guide you throughout the entire planning process, getting to know you well and helping to build the celebration that is right for you. You get maximum say, maximum fun, and maximum partying, for minimum time input.
For those of you keen to embark on planning your own day, I’d say definitely go for it, it’s such a fun process. If time starts to feel like it’s slipping you by, remember wedding planners are there to help at any stage.
For couples part way along their planning journey, partial planning can be the answer. This sees a wedding planner join your team and support you with the rest of the decisions and planning, in addition to being there on the wedding day itself.
Finally, on the subject of time, have you thought about how you’ll spend the time on your wedding day? Having fun, right?
This might seem like a silly question at first, but as you plan your own wedding, make sure you consider this. If you can’t access the venue before your wedding day, then balancing your time between setting up your wedding and actually getting dressed and relaxing on the wedding morning, ready to fully enjoy your day can be difficult.
Fast forward a few hours and you’ve got suppliers arriving that have questions and need directions whilst you’re trying to enjoy your wedding breakfast. Don’t let setup and supplier liaison eat into your precious celebration time, save this time for partying with family and friends and hand the on-the-day coordination over to a Wedding Planner. Yes, that really is a service we offer! Perfect for the DIY wedding couples amongst you who want to thoroughly enjoy every moment of the wedding you’ve worked so hard to plan.
2. Reassurance
Not only do wedding planners have the time to dedicate to the planning of your wedding, but their experience is invaluable too. Whether this is the first or fifth wedding or large celebration you’ve planned for yourself, family or friends, planning your own wedding comes with an unfortunately large amount of pressure. You are likely to find yourself going around in circles deliberating what you should be planning and when, spending hours researching your suppliers, and then worrying whether you’ve got everything covered.
There are many great wedding planning timelines, schedules and guides out there for you to use throughout the planning process, and these are fantastic resources for those of you planning to tackle the task on your own.
Whilst ticking off the list on a printed guide is useful, there’s nothing more reassuring than having an experienced professional carefully scour all of your plans with a fine-toothed comb. Regardless of whether you’ve had a planner support you from the start, or whether they’re joining you for on the day coordination, your wedding planner will be able to give you the thumbs up or provide any helpful guidance or trusted contacts for logistics or suppliers accidentally overlooked. Yep, you read that right, even for on the day coordination we’ll help you review your plans and provide reassurance at a handover before the big day.
Or, if you’ve got everything under control and are not keen on using the full services of a wedding planner, look for consultation options during which you can gain insight, advice and inspiration from a professional, all specific to you and your day.
3. Budget
Choosing to have a wedding planner is an investment, but can you afford not to have one?
Not only is it hard to put a price on the time saved, the stress minimised and the expertise gained, wedding planners can save you money too.
Wedding planners are able to advise you on how much something is really worth and ensure you avoid any scams, poor quality products, and prices that unfortunately are too good to be true and leave you in difficulty or having to double purchase.
Instead, armed with our personally picked lists of trusted recommended suppliers, opting for full or partial planning options will see us help you to stick to budget whilst ensuring you receive the best quality for the best price (sometimes even grabbing you a special offer too!).
Assisting you with your budgeting as part of a full or partial planning package also allows wedding planners to encourage you to think carefully about your day and your priorities. We work with you to discover which aspects of your wedding matter the most to you and therefore deserve the most investment, ensuring your wedding budget gets spent in the most meaningful way to you and creates the most memorable magic it can.
As an eco-conscious wedding planner myself, I also like to support my couples to save money whilst minimising their waste. I encourage hiring as a more cost effective and planet friendly solution than buying, encourage as much reuse of items across your wedding day as I can to avoid additional purchases, and encourage you to think of how you can get more use and financial benefit from everything after your wedding day too.
4. Problem Solving
Newsflash! Weddings might look perfect in your glossy mags and on your favourite blogs, and your day will look perfect too when you’re flicking through your photo album and reminiscing, but perfect isn’t always perfect throughout!
Things aren’t always possible to control, the unexpected can and does happen, and no, even a wedding planner won’t always have been able to plan ahead for absolutely everything. BUT, what a wedding planner can do is smooth out any hiccups that do occur, whether that’s during the planning process or on the day itself.
Choosing to have a wedding planner is like choosing to have a PA, they become the go to person instead of you and can handle things on your behalf.
Take the current Coronavirus pandemic for example, we are in unprecedented times with an unprecedented impact on weddings. Whilst none of us want to be in the business of postponing weddings at the moment, couples have been alleviating the stress by leaving the rapidly changing situations and hours of communication and rescheduling in the capable and trusted hands of their wedding planner instead.
Coronavirus aside, wedding planners have always been the go-to, professional, trusted friend and problem solver for their couples. They stay calm under pressure, are good at thinking creatively on their feet, and whilst they might not have a sixth sense and been able to see into the future for you; they will have contacts to call on, knowledge and experience under their belt, and have helped you to build a dream team that will rally together to problem solve and find the best solution they possibly can, no matter what or when along the process it occurs.
Above all, we problem solve so that you can continue to celebrate, never have to lift a finger, and more often than not can be perfectly oblivious to the hiccup having ever occurred!
5. Perspective
Whilst it’s not something that automatically comes to mind as something you need, having an outside perspective from someone who is slightly removed from the event can be such a huge advantage when it comes to planning.
Typically family and friends, whether you want it or not, will share their ideas and subtly (or not!) hint towards their expectations for your day, and it can be hard to keep in mind that it’s YOUR DAY!
There is also a wealth of information and inspiration at our fingertips now, definitely acting as a blessing but also sometimes a curse as we find ourselves getting a little lost.
By taking an outsider’s perspective and starting from scratch when getting to know you as a couple, wedding planners are well placed to help you wade through the fog of ideas and input you might have, instead being able to guide you and inspire you with things that ring true to what really makes you both work so well as a couple.
Much of the job of a wedding planner is as a mediator, helping you to find common ground, identify what really matters most to you both, and negotiate compromises if and where they might be needed.
Whilst we do become like your close friend across the process and are invested in making your day truly special, our experience has taught us the importance of taking a back step and looking at the wider picture to also make it truly yours. This is something we love guiding our couples on, whether you’re embarking on a full planning experience, having us as support on the day, or even just enlisting our consultation support mid planning.
Feel like you need help from a wedding planner for 1, 2 or all 5 of these reasons?
With different wedding planners offering slightly different combinations of services be sure to check out your local planners to see how they can help.
At Green Soul Weddings, I offer full planning, partial planning, on the day coordination, and wedding wisdom 1:1 (my consultation-only option for you to use as and when you need it).
I focus on helping you produce YOUR dream day in a more environmentally conscious way and cover Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire for my in-person services. My consultation-only option is country-wide aso please do get in touch for an initial chat".
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