Is it too early?

[DisBride011]

I am planning our wedding for August 2012. I want to be able to plan as stress free as possible and not have to rush as well as have enough time to save up money for exactly what I want. I have not yet picked out an exact place for our ceremony or reception because I am not sure how many people will travel to WDW for the wedding. DF has a rather large family and I am not sure who will travel.

My question is: Is it too early to send out a pre-RSVP?

We do not have an exact date picked. I am a teacher and we have a summer program which ends at a different time each year, but always 2 weeks at the end of August. We have to have the wedding when I have the time off because I have friends who also work with me and we all can't take off at the same time, so we all have scheduled time off together.

Also if anyone has any suggestions or ideas on doing a pre-RSVP/questionnaire please share or post yours so I can have some ideas.

I know this turned out to be a long posted, I started rambling, sorry. I'll stop now.

Thanks!

 

[sambycat]

i take it you mean a STD?

i personally would not send out anything in writing or even an email until i at least talked with DFTW (assuming that is the type of wedding you are planning) and knew that my date was "open". summer time is busy so i would imagine it might be a little more competition for venues or dates, depending. sertainly, i'd probably be telling people informally that we were thinking of a DFTW as a "heads up", and i know all the dates for booking things has changed a bit, but its still pretty early and there are dozens of reasons why plans - even plans you are so sure of - coud change!!

in the meantime, think of how much you'll know and be ready for when it gets a bit closer!

that said, we sent our STDs out in late february, when we were "penciled in", for our late january 2011 wedding.

 

[amyy]

I am probably the minority but I didn't send out invites until everyone had already bought there plane tickets. I kind of sent it out as a formality. When we first starting thinking about a Disney wedding I talked with my cousins who felt that a Disney cruise was too expensive for them thus we switched to a Disney wedding. We don't have a lot of family so maybe that made it easier. I probably flat out just said we are getting married at Disney and can you come. Even with that it wasn't until the last few months that everyone decided for sure which doubled our guest count and budget.

 

[DisBride011]

Thanks for the advice. I do have over 2 years so the date thing I'm not too concerned with being taken. I an just thinking that if not too many people are willing to travel maybe I could get away with and escape wedding instead of a wishes wedding. I am going down at the end of August this year and am planning on talking to DFTW while I'm there and wanted an idea of how many people so I could choose a venue and stuff. Certain places only have a certain capacity for people.

End of August is actually part of the low season for weddings, really not concerned with the date.

Also I don't really talk to an of DF's family, neither does he (at least not very often), so that hinders the word of mouth idea. Most of the people I have talked too are on board but it's the distant/out of state people I am concerned with.

I guess I will figure it it....eventually

 

[erin.w]

We sent out the STD's around a year before. We ended up having to cut the list of who we were inviting once we started to get an idea of how much it would cost. And believe it or not, no one we have invited has said no, so we couldn't rely on that to save money! hehe

 

[BecBennett]

Have you had an engagement party? We used ours to talk to our guests and let them know what we were thinking.

Then we sent out a newsletter to let them know we'd decided on a DFTW at 2 years, then we sent out a STD at 12 months, another newsletter at about 10 months, and we're going to send out invites in October - which is 5 months out.

I like to make sure everyone knows exactly what's going on, and has plenty of time to organise themselves.

 

[DisBride011]

Thanks again for some more advice.

I don't know how to quote, but BecBennett: we have not had an engagement party. I don't plan on really having one, I have a small family and most of DF's family is far away, so it wont really work for us.

I am thinking of sending of engagement announcements or something similar and maybe including a little newsletter letting people know what our plans are. I am thinking of maybe including a little pre-rsvp to try and get a head count on how many people will make the trip. This would make planning so much easier if I had an approximate of how many are definitely going to show, maybe, or definitely not.

I'm still open to any suggestions. Thanks!

 

[DVC Bride 2011]

I wouldn't send a pre-rsvp or anything until you confirm your date with DFTW - if you do Wishes, you can do it as early at 16 months out if you do not use a convention center. There are so many reasons why your date can change, especially if you use a convention center reception location, or if by chance your date is taken, etc. You wouldn't want your guests to request time off work this early only to have the date change, you know? It seems that DFTW is really make an effort to make it easier for brides to plan by giving us an idea of our date earlier than they had been.

 

[Brit_Jude]

Hi,

My suggestion would be to send out an engagement annoncement/newsletter. For the people you want to invite to your wedding add to the annoncement letting people know what you are planning for your wedding and a rough timeframe. Then ask them to send you an e-mail/call etc. if they would be interested in travelling and joining you for your wedding at Disney so that you are able to start the initial planning.

I don't know if a budget is an issue for you but if so I would be careful and only do this to those that I thought I would be able to afford to host at the wedding. You can always add people later when sending out STD's if you budget allows but it is very hard to uninvite people if you later find that your budget will not run to all the people you originally mentioned it to.

 

[girli565]

I didn't send anything out until I got my date confirmed by DFTWs. I knew it would have to be an early summer date so I was worried that we wouldn't get it. So once I got the confirmation I told the person making our save the dates to print them out!

 

[DisBride011]

Thanks everyone for all your advice. I'm going to send out and engagement announcement and include a little note letting everyone know where/when I am planning the wedding and just asking them to send me note letting me know if they will be interested in joining us to celebrate. I'll probably send a little postcard (addressed and stamped) type thing for them to send back to me so I can get an idea of how many are interested.

I just want an idea before I talk to anyone at DFTW, so that I am not going crazy trying to figure everything out. I'm still not concerned with the date being that I'm planning for August 2012. I have plenty of time to book and get the date I want.

Thanks!

 

[sambycat]

good luck it sounds like a good way to go! i cant help but throw my same 2 cents back in and say be SURE, so positive, so ultra sure beyond a doubt that you want to invite every person you send a combo announcement/inquiry too and that you are POSITVE you can afford to invite all the people you query!!!

but then i am a nervous nellie, so....!!! good luck and again, congrats!

 

[Butler_chic07]

I think the engagement announcements are a really good idea! That would have been my suggestion. I know how you feel, somewhat. DFi has a pretty large family, but is not really close to them, but they have quite a few children, so I thought that many of them might try to make our wedding their yearly vacation. I have a small family, but also a large step-family I am rather close with. It was really hard for me to try to figure out an estimate of how many people would come, so I understand the frustration. I also think that this provides them a while longer to put away money for a trip. I know that we have family who were hit pretty hard by the economy who would love to come, but just don't know if they can afford it.

So now that I have rambled, I thought I would tell you I completely support the engagement announcement idea.

 

[89mj88]

you wouldnt believe how excited i was that i saw you have a august 2012 wedding planned. that makes me feel so much better that im starting to plan my oct 2012 wedding

so far i just have informally told people our idea to kinda get a feel for what they think but after reading these post i realize it our wedding and i should do it the way i dreamed and not work around everyone else or else ill be dissappointed.

anyways first i hv to figure out who we really want at our wedding and who we think would come. my list could go out of control if i just invited everyone but i just want people there that we truly care about

wow this went long sorry....

 

[DisBride011]

89mj88 - Thanks! I'm glad to see that more 2012 brides are showing up on the boards. Also that I am not the only one with the "not sure if it's too early" dilemma.

Happy Planning!

 

[pezaddict231]

Congrats! We did something similar with the Save the Date and newsletter. I have pictures in my PJ. We only started planning at about a year out so I sent the Save the Date once Disney confirmed the date, but you could easily just put "August 2012" or something like that.

We sent out pre-rsvp cards and it did help because some of the venues I was looking at only hold 50 people, so I needed to know if we'd be able to use them or not. I did find though that most people said "maybe" rather than "no", even if they weren't really planning to come, and some didn't respond at all. Luckily we did get over 50 yes's, so I knew we couldn't use the smaller rooms. Right now our guest list looks like it will be about 70, although we still have some RSVP stragglers.

Good luck with your planning!

 

[chelsrae85]

I don't think that the original poster meant save the dates, based on what I'm reading.

Here's what we are doing for our Spring/Early Summer 2012 wedding. I just recently made a blog post about it here, and asked friends and family to go comment with their answers to these questions:

1) will you plan to attend the destination wedding, the at-home reception, both, or neither?
2) number of estimated people attending in your party

I didn't include a specific date, as you can see, because it's WAY too far in advance, but I just posted the gist of the wedding to get an idea of how many people are actually serious about planning to attend.

 

[Sarah84]

We are planning for late april 2012 and I sent out save the dates a couple of months ago, we are only planning an Escape wedding, so a small number of guests but as we are coming from the UK I wanted to give everyone as much notice as possible becasue of saving and holiday time etc plus I am far too excited to wait any longer to send them out

 

[Kristinella]

Hi! We are getting married on 8.8.11

We recently sent out our Save the Dates (around the 14th month out mark) with a Pre-RSVP, here is what the Pre-RSVP card looked like (there was more included in our STD packages)

So far it's working out well....we have 41 yes' and 5 no's

Hope this helps! Good Luck

 

[DisBride011]

Thanks Kristinella! Just curious... what did you put in your save the date packages?