Everything You Need to Know About Save-the-Dates

f you’re fresh off prime proposal season, and happened to land the rock (!), you’ve most likely entered major wedding-planning mode. The clock starts ticking when the ring goes on—and soon friends and family will be calling in droves asking when the big date is. Therefore, your first order of business (after the celebratory bubbly, of course) is deciding where and when to get married. Then it’s time to save the date!

Since it’s the very first formal communication with guests about your wedding, the “save-the-date” has become a prime piece of nuptial mail. As with all wedding correspondence, this is more than just a style statement. No matter your creative choice, all save-the-dates should clearly invite guests to mark your date their calendars, book their hotel rooms, and boogie on down to the wedding eight-to-ten months down the road. This is especially true if you plan to wed during vacation season or over a holiday weekend.

Designed to give your guests a preview of your wedding style, save-the-dates have paper designers pushing the envelope. You might choose a sleek, simple card, a vintage postcard, or something with full-on fun surprises like confetti, balloons or encrypted spy messages. They can be traditional or modern, include your photo or fun, whimsical touches, like timelines of your courtship. For the digitally driven, email save-the-dates can link directly to your wedding webpage. Some creative couples have even turned to YouTube to record movie trailer-style save-the-date previews.

Of course, there are a few things you’ll need to get in order before sending off those save-the-dates off to family and friends:

1) Make sure you’ve actually booked your date and venue (if you are scouting venues, check out wedding location search engines like wedding-spot.com). Next, be sure to book your hotel room group reservations. Be mindful of the high traffic seasons at your wedding destination (an autumn wedding in a big sports-town during football season could jack up your hotel room rates or skewer availability).

2) Set up a personal wedding website so that you can include the URL on your save-the-date. New wedding website services like Riley & Grey (rileyandgrey.com), Nearlyweds (nearlyweds.com), and The Knot (theknot.com) offer dynamic webpage templates that coordinate with some of the most popular invite designs—and tie directly into your registries and social media accounts.

3) Note that it is never too early to get your address list in order. Sending save-the-dates will help you get your guest list in check early on. This will help you plan your wedding in more ways than one and can help flush out your in-laws’ guest-list gripes (if they have any) before serious decisions are made.

4) Consider the groups to whom you are sending the save-the-date. For instance, if you have a big family, and are only inviting some of your family, or, if you are inviting only a handful of office-mates, it may be better to avoid hurt feelings by skipping out on their save-the-dates and, instead, just sending them an invitation, to keep the buzz to a whisper.

One final word: if you have a B-list, keep it quiet, and do not send anyone a save-the-date who isn’t on your A-list. You can always send out more as you go along when you have additional room on your list, but it’s uncouth (and unkind) not to send an invitation to someone who’s already received your save-the-date. That’s one big wedding no-no.