Managing your RSVPs is truly one of the most annoying tasks throughout your wedding planning process. No matter what you do, there will always be a group of people that aren’t RSVPing when they are supposed to that you’ll inevitably have to track down and pull an answer from. Here are some steps you can take when planning your wedding to make sure you are doing everything possible to make this process as easy as possible for you.

Hire a Planner

If you’re lucky, you can hire yourself a planner that will take care of most of this stuff for you! You wouldn’t really have to read passed the 3rd step if you have a wedding planner that takes care of your RSVP management. I personally offer RSVP management for my full service planning couples that will take care of ordering and managing your RSVPs for you so you don’t have to think about a thing! If you are able to pay for this service, I would highly recommend it so you don’t have to take the time to stress about it.

2. Write a Guest List

The first main task for you is to get your guest list written out. As you are doing this, I usually recommend having your guests grouped together in sections that you can imagine them sitting together with. This will help with keeping things together for your seating chart. Make sure to number each guest so that you know your final guest count nice and easily.

3. Number Guest List by Households

The guest list you have in the step above will help, but you should make a copy of it before moving forward. What you’ll want to do with this copy is to number these off by households, and not by guests anymore. This is the number of invites that you will be needing to send out to your guests and will ensure that you don’t accidentally buy more than double the invitations you need.

4. Set your RSVP Deadline

To figure out your RSVP deadline, the easiest thing to do is to default to your catering vendor and/or your venue. These vendors are the most likely to have a deadline for your food count or for the venue, which is typically about 1 month before the wedding. When you find the sooner due date, I always recommend setting your RSVP deadline 1 week before the soonest guest count deadline you’ll need to submit. This will help you make sure you have enough time to gather the last of the RSVPs for people that don’t RSVP in time.

5. Order RSVPs

If you’re doing paper invites, You can use your household list to know how many invitations and RSVPs you will need to order.

6. Also (or instead) Try Online RSVPs

I actually recommend offering an online RSVPs for the ease of you and your guests. It takes out a lot of the guessing on specifically who is invited, what is offered for dinner, and it also keeps all of them in one place instead of having to collect them in the mail with the potential of them getting lost. If you are allowing kids, giving guests plus ones, or offering dietary restrictive options (i.e. vegetarian, gluten free, or kids meals), this is also something that you can track nice and easily on a lot of the online tracking options! If you’re worried about your older guests not understanding, you can always have someone personally help them out or just take it down from them separately. Many of the online tracking sites are pretty simple to use and most people will be able to figure it out pretty easily.

7. Number your RSVPs

For physical invitations, I recommend you to take a pen and write small numbers in the corner on the back of the RSVP cards themselves. These numbers need to correspond to the numbers on that household guest list you have, in case those people don’t have their names on the RSVPs. If you receive RSVPs and you don’t know who they are from, you’ll be able to figure out who it is from based off of the number on the back.

8. Prepare your RSVPs

Make sending them to you as easy as possible for your guests (put on stamps, the return address, and your address to each envelope, add “and guest” to any envelopes that include a plus one, etc.)

9. Mark Down your RSVPs

As soon as you receive your RSVP, mark down how many are attending, all food choices, and additional information. You can cross them off of your list once you have this down in 1-3 safe places.

10. Check for Stragglers

Once you get to your RSVP deadline, check your list and see who needs some additional prompting. Let them know you have reached the time you need your final guest count (without telling them how many days are left) and get your answers if they are coming or not.

Keeping track of your RSVPs and doing your seating chart is really some of the toughest parts of wedding planning. If you follow these steps, you should hopefully be able to relieve some of the stress you’ll face. If you would like some more help to plan your wedding, you can reach out to me here. Dealing with the RSVPs is a pain, but I would love to take that off of your plate for you!