Determining Your Wedding RSVP Date
One of the most common questions I get is "What should my wedding RSVP date be?". In general, your RSVP date should be 1 to 2 months before your wedding date. When determining your exact RSVP date you need to consider the following:
The due date of your final head count to your caterer or reception site
The number of invited guests
Your family and your fiance's family
The RSVP method (i.e. phone, email, webpage, or snail mail)
Let's go through each of these bullet points separately...
The due date of your final head count. If your caterer/reception site has requested that they receive your final head count (i.e. number of wedding guests) two weeks before your wedding date, then you must actually know that number two weeks before your wedding date. Therefore, your RSVP date must be, at a very minimum, 2 weeks and a day before your wedding date. You get the idea...
The number of invited guests. If you are only inviting 20 people to your wedding, it won't take you very long to receive and count your RSVPs. When there are only 20 invited guests and we make the assumption that 10% of all invited wedding guests neglect to RSVP or do not RSVP on time, that means there are only 2 people that you will need to phone or email to determine if they will be attending the wedding. This amount of personal follow-up will probably only take you a few days. If, however, you are inviting 250 people to your wedding and we assume the same 10% failure rate, that means you will have to follow up with 25 guests which will take considerably more time.
Your family and your fiance's family. This seems like a strange thing to consider when determining your RSVP date, but it is, nevertheless, extremely important. You know your family and, hopefully, your fiance knows his/her family as well. Ask yourself these questions: How responsive are your families? Will they respond in a timely manner? Or will you have to personally follow up with most of them? Will they invite extra people to the wedding (i.e. people who were not specifically mentioned on the invitation envelope)? Will you then have to call them and explain that it costs you $200 to feed each guest and you really can't afford those extra people that they have invited? If your family or your fiance's family is, shall we say, a more difficult family, then you may want your RSVP date to be a few weeks before your head count is due to the caterer.
The RSVP method. The most traditional and the most widely used RSVP method is the snail mail method. These days, however, many couples are choosing to receive RSVPs by email or website submission (see www.favorofareply.com as an example) as the cost of stamps increases (42 cents!) and the percentage of internet-savvy wedding guests increases. If you choose the RSVP snail mail method, you should give yourself more time to receive your RSVPS, than if you choose the website or email RSVP method. This is just common sense. If you are receiving RSVPs via snail mail, then there is always a chance that something will get lost in the mail or that your guests will actually mail their RSVPs out on the RSVP date instead of before. If you have a lot of out-of-town guests, this could mean that you may not receive many of your RSVPs until a week after your RSVP date. If, however, you choose to receive RSVPs by email or website submission, then even if your guests wait until the RSVP date to respond, you will still receive their RSVP on time.
Let's review with an example:
John Smith and Betty Johnson are to be wed on August 15th, 2008. Their final head count is due to their caterer two weeks before their wedding (August 1st). They are inviting 250 very unresponsive guests to their wedding. Because of the large number of guests they are inviting and the nature of those guests (procrastinators), they are allowing three extra weeks to receive their RSVPs, count their RSVPs and follow up with their guests. This puts their RSVP date on about July 11th (or 3 weeks before August 1st). Since John and Betty are using snail mail RSVPs and they have a few out-of-town guests, they have decided to allow an additional week for postage delays. This means that John and Betty's wedding RSVP date will be on about July 4th or 6 weeks before their wedding date.
