How to choose your wedding planner

Finding the perfect vendors can be extremely overwhelming. With so many beautiful Instagram pages, it’s hard to know where to begin. You want someone who is reliable, trustworthy, and understands your vision for the big day.  Many of you are currently searching for your wedding planner, and although we would love to assist you – we want to be sure you find the perfect fit for the big day, even if it isn’t here at Pop Parties. Today, you’ll find some tips on how to select your wedding planner for your celebration.

Self Evaluation

First off, be honest with yourself about your needs from a wedding planner. It’s important to know your personality type, and how much time and effort you are able to commit to planning your big day. Many wedding planners offer a variety of services like the ones listed below, but not all planners offer all services. Take a peek at our chart below to see where your planning needs may fall based on your personality, and wedding style.

Online Presence

Secondly, take a peek through each companies online presence. This includes their Instagram account, pinterest page, blog, website, and review sites. Make sure the types of items they are posting align with your style and expectations for the big day. Do you like their communication style? Do you feel like you identify with how they speak on stories, etc? Are they featured on other pros pages who you admire? Do they have educational content that helps you understand the wedding industry further? Chances are, those are just highlights of insight into what they are able to offer you if you hired them.

Look at the details – wedding planners are known to tie together the smallest of things for the biggest celebrations. Are the chairs in perfect rows? Do you like their color combinations and eye for design aesthetic? Posted images can tell you a lot about a wedding planners’ attention to detail in both design, and the execution on your wedding day.

Check review sites and don’t be shy to ask other industry pros for recommendations. Online reviews add validity through others’ experiences with the planner of your liking. Make sure to read reviews for them, and see how recent the reviews are. Reviews give you an idea of how they care for clients and what other brides are saying about that planner and their team.

If you are touring venues before hiring your planner (tisk tisk!), ask the venue manager about wedding planner referrals, or about a specific company you are considering. Industry pros work together often and know the good, the bad, and the ugly about one another. Gauge their review to see if you’ll be in good hands.

Overall Investment

Third, any decision you make surrounding your wedding should be guided by the investment. Notice I did not say COST. The most important thing for you to determine while selecting your planner is how much value they will add to your planning process. A great wedding planner can not only help to save you time and money, but they will help add value such as peace of mind, organizational tools, and lots of education throughout the whole process. Most full service wedding planners charge a percentage of the total event spend, while services for ‘partial planning’ or ‘month of’ are a fixed rate. Chances are, the more value a planner knows they will add to your process, the higher their fee will be.

Wedding planner fees are determined based on a number of things including but not limited to:

Years of experience in the business
Varying types of work history in the business
Overhead costs to run a financially healthy and sustainable business
Number of hours it takes to successfully serve each client
Additional fees like onsite labor for the wedding day

5 Questions to ask your potential planner

1. What is your ideal wedding or client?

This is a great question because it gives you an insight into a planners passion. Whatever they feel their “niche” is – the better you are able to see if it aligns to your overall vision for the big day and if you are a good fit to work together and trust the process of that planner.

2. How do you add value throughout the planning process?

I love this question because every qualified wedding planner should know how to answer it. If they don’t, I’d suggest trying a few more planners before selecting someone.

3. What is your backup plan if you cannot make our wedding in an emergency?

By nature, we are planners, even a planner must have a plan, especially in a worldwide pandemic.

4. Do you work individually or as a team, and how does that benefit us?

There are pros and cons to working with larger teams vs. individual planners. There is no right or wrong in who you select, but make sure to ask about the benefits that each type of planner offers to you as the client. As a team, we add value through varying skill sets. Our in house designer can sketch, produce 3D renderings, and more. Plus our event managers are so well versed in logistics, it makes for a seamless event every time. For us, working as a team has many added benefits to our clients including discounts on other vendor services because of the volume of events we are able to refer each year.

5. Why do you charge the fee that you do?

This is my favorite question. If a planner cannot explain their own fee to you, and why they charge what they do –  how can you trust them to guide your financial decisions for your entire wedding process?

As always thank you for reading our post! If you found some of this helpful, please leave us a comment below! We love serving our readers and clients with honesty and facts driven by experience to provide the best advice and value to you in your planning journey.