Mr. and Mrs. President…

Did you know that if you invite the President and First Lady to your wedding that they send you a congratulatory message?

See you guys on Saturday!

Grooms Hat

As some of you may know, I have a lot of hats. Baseball hats, wool beanies, cabbie hats, a lot. At one point, close to 70. I don’t wear hats that often anymore, but I wanted one for the wedding, and I finally found one.

And with a week left before the wedding, it’s a good thing I found it in time!

One month!

We are one month out from the wedding! I can’t believe how quickly it snuck up on us. There has been a lot of planning, stress, making things in the past year and a half, and there is so much still left to do and the two minute warning just went off.

The thing we are most excited for is to have all of our friends and family in one place for the first time. A lot of people, not just us, have been waiting on this day for a long time (Hi, Mom!) and we can’t wait to share it with all of our family and friends both here in Houston and New Jersey in November.

Having this blog and posting sneak peeks, planning details and pictures of me trying to embarrass Ali has been awesome, and the wedding won’t be the end of this blog. We’ll keep blogging all the fun and goofy stuff we do, as you’d expect.

We can’t wait to see you all next month!

Wedding Planning and Online Marketing Nerdery

Most of our wedding planning and preparation up to this point has been full of nerd stuff, and it’s only gotten worse.

A few months ago when we were designing our wedding invitations, as with any couple planning a wedding, we were looking at areas where we could save money. The RSVP instantly came to mind. The cost of another insert card, envelope extra postage because of the weight and postage for the RSVP card adds up quickly.

In an effort to work around that, we jumped on the green RSVP trend that has been going on for the past few years – online RSVP forms.

This was a beautiful thing for many reasons.

1. Using an online form service allowed us to customize our RSVP and get all the information we needed, guest names, if they were coming, and if yes, their dinner options.
2. We won’t be getting a ton of mail that has to be opened, read, recorded and stored.
3. Since the  data is in digital form, and can easily be imported into Google Docs where 85% of our planning has taken place.
4. There’s no margin of error on our part. With paper RSVPs, we might accidentally mark you a “yes” for fish, when you wanted the beef. If there is something wrong, it’s your fault. (Sucker!)
5. It reduced the cost of our wedding invitations by about 10-15%.

Another major plus to doing an online RSVP was that we could send the guest to a specific thank you page based on how they answered. For our non-marketing friends out there, when a visitor to a website fills out an online form, you can send them to a different page once they click “submit”. On this thank you page, you can do a lot of different things, like offer a white-paper download, invite them to watch a webinar, whatever.

Since over half of our guests are coming in from out of town we decided that our thank you pages needed to have hotel information on them and driving directions to the venues for the in-town guests.

But that created a problem. We didn’t want to send someone to a page with hotel information and directions if they weren’t coming (the jerks), so what to do?

Enter Jotform, an easy to use (and free) web form creator. I use it quite often at work and it was the perfect solution for us because the forms have conditional functions. If a person RSVP’s yes, they go to a thank you page with the hotel information and directions. If they answer no, they are sent to a thank you page saying we’re sorry that they can’t come, and a link to the blog to stay informed and to see pictures of the events leading up to the wedding and beyond.

How about another monkey wrench into the RSVP flow? We’re having a second reception in New Jersey for friends and family who couldn’t make it to Houston for the ceremony. And some friends and family were invited to both events, so that is a lot more thank you pages than just a yes or no. We had to create a diagram to make sure that we hit all the possibilities.

As you can see there are eight different outcomes. Since things were getting really out of hand with the amount of pages that we would need, we decided to scale back where we could. We treated any “no” response as the same “no”. We’re very sorry you couldn’t share the day with us, but please keep checking back.

The “yes” responses were different. The Yes to Houston and Yes to New Jersey went to a unique page for each location. A Yes Houston/New Jersey went to a page with the same information as the yes to Houston and yes to New Jersey. A yes/no or no/yes went to the affirmative RSVP for the respective location.

We made this incredibly difficult and nerdy because that’s just who we are. We had the knowledge and tools available. It started with saving links and ideas to services like Google Docs Spreadsheets, Delicious and Evernote, to our Save the Date video that we emailed out using the email marketing service Constant Contact and it hasn’t ended yet.

A Very Kroger Wedding

I had a very strange dream last night, one where we had to change our wedding venue to a Kroger grocery store. But, it was okay, because it was a fancy Kroger, with an all-in-one banquet hall just behind where they keep the shopping carts lined up.

I don’t remember everything, but I am going to try and document as much as possible.

Not only were we getting married at the Kroger, but everything was going wrong.

Some of the bridal party wasn’t wearing the right clothes, but then they were, and not again.

My sister Amy was in charge of the music for some reason, and she played all of the songs in the wrong order. (Sorry, Amy.)

When Ali was trying to walk down the aisle, the kid pushing the shopping carts was yelling at her for being in the way. “These carts need to be re-stocked! Get out of the way, lady!” While that was going on, I was off to the side goofing off with friends, not paying attention (totally out of character for me, I know).

After Ali got to the front, I rushed up the aisle all nonchalant like, trying to pass off that was the way it was supposed to happen.

At this point I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Ali was looking at me with that WTF face. Then, magically we were at the back of the Kroger reception hall, Ali in a full blown wedding dress, and me a in crazy tuxedo and she looked at me and said “screw this, we’re starting over.”

Needless to say, Ali was pissed.

Texas Baby Blues

In our quest to do our wedding our way and make it all Mike and Ali, we’re making a lot of the items and decorations ourselves. Also, everything that we are using has a special meaning.

This has also carried over to the table assignments. If it was up to us, we would just let it be a free for all and let people sit where they wanted. However, the venue is requiring not only table assignments, but seating assignments as well so they know who ordered what dish at RSVP time (more on this when the time comes) and where to serve it.

This request forced us to add an extra layer of Mike and Ali to the planning. We weren’t about to just number the tables and leave it at that, we needed table names that were meaningful, and unique.

On a further level of making everything ourselves, we are incorporating my photography into the table names and assignment cards.

One of the table names is “The Lone Star State”, and we were trying to come up with a photo that represent Texas.

Cut to a few weeks ago, I was telling Ali I wanted to drive out into the sticks (didn’t have to go far in Texas!) to get some photos of bluebonnets, the state flower of Texas.

We set out this past Saturday morning to Chappel Hill, Texas, A little town that hosts the Bluebonnet festival every year, a little over an hour outside of Houston. The town itself was a little disappointing.

We were hoping that the town that not only hosts the Bluebonnet Festival every year (the biggest festival in Texas) and the town that calls itself the “birthplace of Texas” to have a little more history to  explore.

That not withstanding, we had a fun time on our little road trip and we accomplished our goal of taking some great photos of Bluebonnets.

To see the rest of the photos, take a look at my Flickr photo stream.

Finding the Perfect Wedding Cake

Thanks to my Best Man Phil for bringing this to our attention. You all see why he has that title.