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It is a really great and highly recommended thing to hire a Day Of Coordinator for your wedding. The right one can make your wedding go so much easier and pull everything together for you, even under stressful or less-than-ideal conditions.
But the key is making sure you hire the right one! All Day Of Coordinators are NOT created equal!
There are essentially three types:
- The decorator or florist who offers this as an “add on” service to their décor or floral package. Their price is variable from free to several hundred dollars.
- The person you find on Kijiji who will show up on your wedding day. Often between $150 – 500.
- The professional wedding planner who does this as their core business. Generally in the Toronto area cost between $800 – $1400.
Many people will select their Day Of Coordinator on price alone. This is madness as you really do get what you pay for!
Successful Day Of Coordination is a whole lot more than just showing up and handing out programs at the church or putting out guest favours. If that is all you want then you are just looking for “hired help” and not “coordination”.
Done correctly, your Day Of Coordinator:
- Must be engaged with you a month before your wedding
- Must meet with you at least once in the week or two before the wedding, for at least two hours, to review all the plans that you have put in place as well as creating detailed documents that will be followed on the wedding day. For example you will work with him/her to create a very detailed itinerary that is down to the minute if need be. Not only is this critical for yourself, your bridal party and your Coodinator but other vendors (such as the photographer, the MC, even the venue itself) require a copy of this. This takes some time to put together!
- Must understand all your seating arrangements and requirements for special meals, accessibility issues for certain guests, etc.
- Must understand and document all your décor requirements including guest favours, wedding programs, placement of items such as photos, money boxes, place cards, centerpieces, etc… any item that is personalizing your wedding must be discussed (who is bringing, where is it going, who is taking away).
- After going through these items with you, must identify areas of risk and things that you may not have thought about or considered. This is usually based on their experience and makes sure that there are no surprises or “gotchas” on the wedding day. Every single time we do this with our clients we hear “Oh, I never thought of that!. Well, now is the time! Nothing should be left to chance!
- Must call each and every vendor you have booked, 3-5 days beforehand, to introduce themselves (and provide contact info in case that vendor has an issue on the Day) and confirm times, responsibilities and expectations.
- Must attend your rehearsal to meet the bridal party and to understand what is taking place for the ceremony, which is absolutely critical to ensure it runs smoothly. In some cases the coordinator will run the rehearsal if there is no officiant present.
- Must bring assistants to help on the day of the wedding. Even the smallest weddings require an assistant present because often the Lead Coordinator’s time is spent coordinating with the venue and the vendors on the day of the wedding and the assistants are there to help with the arriving guests, help with putting out favours, menu cards, chairs, etc. There is often a very limited window of time to do any set up and if you are there alone and people are needing to speak with you (e.g. the banquet captain or the DJ) then you are unable to do the set up at the same time and things run behind. I have found that you need 1 assistant, in addition to the Lead Coordinator, per 80-100 guests for a successful event. That means that for a 200 person wedding, you really need 3 people there (Lead + 2), at least for the critical hours from before the ceremony to the start of dinner. In addition, quite often the bridal party finds it helpful to have one assistant with them during the photoshoot to help carry things, mist flowers, dispense water on a hot day, fluff the dress and generally provide service to the bridal party for those few hours of photography often in the hot sun.
As you can see, it’s not just hiring someone to “be there” for the Wedding Day. A Day Of Coordinator will spend many hours with you and on the phone to your vendors before the wedding doing careful preparation. They are spending time and gas to attend the rehearsal. And they are bringing a team of people to provide excellent service to you, your bridal party and your guests on your Wedding Day. This does require some reasonable fee.
If you are basing your hiring decision on price alone, clearly someone on Kijii who is charging $300 to be your Day Of Coordinator simply cannot be putting in the hours and hours of prep time or providing any additional people for this money. What service are you actually getting?
And the décor person or florist “throwing this in”? Same idea. Not to mention that their priority is their core business so if there is an issue with the décor, they will be giving that priority rather than truly providing an unbiased review of everything that is going on around them and triaging issues as they come up. And most of the time they have more than one order for more than one wedding on a given day. Are they really going to turn away other orders for their core business to provide you with exceptional service on the day?
Quite honestly, a Day of Coordinator is a form of insurance that everything you have planned and are paying for on your Wedding Day is delivered and happening as expected. It’s not so much about spending the extra $500 on a true professional but if you don’t then you could be losing the many thousands you have spent on the wedding if the person you hire doesn’t have a clue and things go wrong.
Currently our fees for Day Of Coordination are $899 for an average 150 person wedding. We would love to hear from you if you need this service. Please contact us for more information!
