5 Things To Do After Getting Engaged

Photo: @alishatova

Hey guys, Kate here. Welcome back to another post of the Wedding Planning Collective blog. There's a season that runs from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day, and we refer to it as “Engagement Season”. This two and a half month time period typically accounts for about 40% of all engagements, with almost half of them happening in December.

With this in mind, I thought it would be a great opportunity to start a series that will take you through the foundational steps every couple must take to plan their weddings. Today we’re going to chat about the five things you need to do after getting engaged, and I’m going to share some of my favorite tools that I recommend to all of my clients.

I’ll be walking you through stages of creating your wedding planning foundation. While we’ve covered some of these individual topics before, in this series we’ll follow the steps in order to help you avoid FOWO - fear of wedding oversight! And after we get your foundation set, we’ll be ready to move on to the structure of your wedding. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves on that just yet, more to come on that later.

Ok, enough about what’s coming up, let’s get into the five things you need to do before you start planning your wedding!

1. Set up a free email account for just wedding related tasks.

Hop on over to gmail or whatever provider you prefer, and create an account where you can keep all of your planning emails separate from your other personal or work emails. It’s inevitable that you’ll end up signing up for many lists and resources (which, if you haven’t already checked out the free guides I’ve put together, you can grab them at planningcollective.com), and things can get very cluttered pretty quickly. With a dedicated account, you can also sort the emails into folders like “florist”, “DJ”, or “photographer”, making it easy to find conversations and details when you need to.

2. The second recommendation ties into the first, and is one of the reasons I recommend a gmail account for your free email account. That is to set up a Google Drive folder where you can hold all your vendor contacts, documents, guests lists, budget, etcetera.

This makes it not only easier for both you and your fiancé to access the documents across your devises, but also share certain items with your family, wedding party, and vendors. We’ll get into another trick with Google Docs when we chat about the guest list in another post in this series.

3. Item number 3, set up a Pinterest board and start collecting inspiration photos.

Ok, so, to be fair. I would say about 90% of my clients had a wedding board on Pinterest BEFORE they got engaged, but now is the time to start weeding out the pretty pics you pinned from the ones that are possible wedding inspiration. I’m not going to get into too much detail about this here, but check out episode 4 of the Wedding Planning Collective podcast for more Pinterest themed wedding tips and warnings! https://anchor.fm/planning-collective/episodes/4---How-to-Use-Pinterest-to-Plan-your-Wedding-enhpi3

4. The fourth tip I want to share with you today is to open a free account on Zola.

While I find that WeddingWire and The Knot are the best platforms to search for and review vendors, Zola offers a much more comprehensive platform that makes it easy to connect your (FREE) wedding website with your gift registry, guest list, and even allows for online RSVP tracking. Of course there are many other features to explore, but I’ve found that the the registry and website features are the most user friendly options out there.

5. And the 5th and final thing you need to do, is join us over in the Wedding Planning Collective Facebook Group, where I’m sharing even more wedding planning resources with you, as well as answering your specific questions with weekly live Q & A sessions.

You can also find a community of other couples to help you through the process. You’ll also want to make sure you’re a part of the group for some fun things coming up throughout the year. Just giving you that heads up :) You can find the link by searching for “The Wedding Planning Collective” in Facebook.

So those are the first 5 things I recommend you get set up before you start getting into the “booking” portion of your wedding planning, which we’ll start to get into in a future post. Again, that’s setting up an email dedicated to your wedding planning, creating a Google Drive folder to keep all of your documents organized. Next is to start or update your wedding Pinterest boards, create a free account on Zola to organize your website, registry, and guest lists. And finally, join us over in the Wedding Planning Collective Facebook Group for more resources and support with your wedding plans.

I want to thank you for tuning into this post today, and I really look forward to being a part of your wedding planning process!