Save the Date Update

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You may have heard that my save the dates pulled double duty as my way of collecting people’s mailing addresses.  Let me update you on how that all went down and my progress so far.

I used wedding wire’s address collecting tool which is pretty simple. It does most of the work for you.  You can either choose to enter your guests info directly on the WW website or upload it from an excel spreadsheet or from your email contacts. I chose to go the excel route. WW provides you with a template that you can use to input your info. It looks like this:

The headers are first name last name for up to 5 guests per household. This is followed by a household header where you input the last name of the household.  Don’t worry about repeating household names. It doesn’t get confused. The rest of the columns are really optional but fun if you like sorting people by groom’s side or bride’s side. 

Once you have that spreadsheet completed you can go ahead and upload it to the WW website.  It populates the Guests section. 

Collecting addresses is easy peasy. Click the “collect addresses” link. 

It totally gives you all the instructions.  Don’t be alarmed, clicking “Get Started” won’t automatically send out emails. That gets you to the next screen where you can start inputting email addresses if you haven’t done so already. You can enter an email for each member of a household but you have to choose a primary contact. Everyone in the household won’t get an email.

Here’s a picture of that page:

Click the check boxes for who you want to send an email. Make sure the proper person is listed as the primary contact. Then click next. Not to worry there are still a few more steps before emails go out.

The next section lists all the people you checked. Look over this part carefully to make sure the primary contact isn’t “Guest Smith”. You don’t want the emails addressed “Dear Guest”. You can then edit the message. Once you’re happy click send email and off they go.

Notes:

1) Think about the email you use for your WW account. That’s who the emails will come from. If your family and friends don’t know your Honeybear2012@hotmail.com email they might ignore it. 

2) The subject line (Please update your address for our wedding) is kinda sketchy.  For those super paranoid automatically delete everything is spam they are out to get me people you know. .. give them a heads up about the email.

3) The actual fill in box is confusing. There’s no real place to put names so you might have to tinker with it later. Some people put names and some just put addresses. Not a big deal but keep it in mind.

4) They’ll see your profile picture once they finish submitting the form.

5) You’ll get an email every time someone updates their info so you might want to create a rule or filter in your e-mailbox.

So far 56 households out of 116 updated their address.  I’ll check the addresses for the missing folk and resend.

You want to hear the bad part? This is totally helping me weed out my guest list. If you don’t update your address you have now self-selected yourself for deletion from the guest list. MUAHAHAHAHA!!