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 make sure you find the perfect fit for the big day, even if it isn’t here at Pop Parties. Here, 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 when it comes to a wedding planner. It’s important to consider 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 here, 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 company’s online presence. This includes their Instagram account, Pinterest page, blog, website, and review sites. Make sure the things they’re posting align with your taste and expectations for the big day. Do you like their communication style? Do you feel like you identify with how they speak in their stories, etc.? Are they featured on other pro’s pages who you admire? Do they have educational content that helps you understand the wedding industry further? Chances are, those are just small nuggets of insight into all that they are able to offer you if you hired them.

Look at the details – Wedding planners are expected to pay attention to the smallest things so that the biggest celebrations go off without a hitch. Are the chairs in perfect rows? Do you like their color combinations and eye for design? These images can tell you a lot about a wedding planner’s attention to detail both in design and in the execution of 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 their reviews and note how recent the reviews are. These can give you an idea of how the planner and their team cares for clients and what other brides are saying about them.

If you are touring venues before hiring your planner (tsk tsk!), 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 your 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 save you time and money, but they will also help give you peace of mind, provide organizational tools, and educate you 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 sufficiently 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 planner’s 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.

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 way, but make sure to ask about the benefits that each type of planner offers to you as the client. As a team at Pop, we add value through varying skill sets. Our in-house Branding and Stationery Director can sketch, produce 3D renderings, design custom invitation suites, and more. Plus our Event Directors 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 through your entire wedding process?

As always, thank you for reading our blog! 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.