Weddingbee Blog

Yup, we have “the number.”

A giant stack of RSVPs

A little under a month out from the wedding and we now know our guest count. The number that all factors can be multiplied by, one to use when putting together the seating chart and, more importantly, the number of family and friends that we are SO excited to celebrate with in May!!

And that number is…

184.

Apologies, Hive, but I’m a data girl and so you’ll have to deal with me as I share with you the way that our number came to be.

I am always interested in hearing RSVP stories – how the attendance shakes out, what % of out of town guests are attending versus local and, mostly, the responses that had to be shaken out of guests. I promise to share all this with you today! Also, I can’t help but share with you some tips and insights – basically things I wish I knew beforehand.

First up, the responses. All our RSVP cards were addressed to Turkey Mom & Dad, as they are the hosts for the evening. So, each day, at around 3PM, we would receive an RSVP email from Turkey Mom. It usually looked something like this:

Wow I had to blur out a lot – sorry for the ugly picture

Turkey Mom included the response card’s number and guest names, when she was able to read them…or they wrote something.

Tip #1: Number your response cards

We had one guest who didn’t put their name on the RSVP and others where we couldn’t read the names. May be worth noting that we did not go “stealth” in our numbering (I just wrote a number in blue pen on the back) and it didn’t cause any issues. In fact, when I was telling a story at the shower about the RSVP without a name, everyone said “where was the number?”

The responses coming from Turkey Mom became a fun family email chain each day. In fact, when you take a look at the email after hers above, you see a response from me that covers the game (yes, game) that we created around the guest list. We had 2 measurements – first, the date when we would receive the first “no” and second, the final guest count. Mr. Turkey had the first “no” date exactly and Turkey Mom was only 1 guest off in the final count.

Insight #1: The RSVP process isn’t just fun for the bride and groom…

Tip #2: …involve your family (or friends)!

Now let’s get into the numbers. We gave about 5 1/2 weeks for guests to respond and the “YES” RSVPs were spread out during the time period we gave them.

NOTE: All info is based on invitations, not people (so, one invite could be 1 person or 4).

This are all our YES responses during the RSVP time period; C = Mr. Turkey, R = Miss Turkey

Week 2 was when we received the bulk of our RSVPs, but Week 1 had an impressive showing, especially when you consider that there were only 2 mail days for responses (based on when we sent out the invites). Our first NO came in Week 2 and then didn’t see many others until Weeks 5 and 6. I guess people wanted to wait to give bad news!

Speaking of bad news, I’ll outline ours now. Here are our Nos, late RSVPs and those that are still missing (we are over a week past the deadline).

Although my “side” had a higher number of “Nos” (50% known beforehand), Mr. Turkey’s side required “hunting”

Believe it or not, the late and missing RSVPs accounted for over 20 people!

Despite missing cards, we were able to beat secure responses from all but one guest at this point (we’ve just assumed they’re not coming…hopefully that’s right). I have also come to peace with the fact that we probably won’t recoup the remaining 6 response cards (won’t be part of the scrapbook).

Insight #2: You WILL have to hunt down guests

Although this wasn’t a huge shock, we did think that the generous timeframe for our guests to respond would reduce the amount of “shakedown” necessary. Yeah, no.

My advice would be to give yourself a buffer between your RSVP date and when you actually need the responses…and have fun emailing / calling / texting for answers! We divided and conquered through the 2 families and we were able to get everything without too much pain.

Now that you see how our invitations came in (and when), let’s get back to the number.

184 meant that 86% of our guests accepted their invitation (wow!).

Mr. Turkey & Turkey Dad give a “thumbs up” for the guest count

That percentage increases to 88% when you take out the +1s for those guests who are leaving their significant other at home (three had to work, one lives abroad and one has another wedding). If you want to really stretch it, we had 91% acceptance if you add on the guests we knew weren’t coming from the beginning (due to inability to travel or immovable engagements – like graduations).

However, any way you cut it, we had a pretty healthy acceptance rate.

Tip #3: Don’t assume 20% of your guests will decline

Maybe it’s just one of those rules of thumb that run within wedding circles, but we had heard that we should expect at least a 20% decline rate. As you can see, we only had a small percentage of guests say no beyond those we already knew were not attending. With our current venue, this number is not an issue, but our original venue had some constraints and such a strong acceptance could have caused some logistical problems (and given us heart palpitations through the process).

Our acceptance rate was also surprising when you consider that more than half of our guests are coming from out of town (64% to be exact). The majority of these guests are from my “side”, but Mr. Turkey has over 30 friends traveling for the weekend plus a number of family members crossing state lines for the wedding. And although we do have guests coming from nearby states (New Jersey, Maryland, DC), there are a decent number coming from the South, West Coast, Midwest, upper New England and even abroad. I won’t bore you with that breakdown.

Insight #3: We are lucky.

Yup, we’re lucky to have as many people as we do willing to take the time (and money) necessary to travel for our wedding day. This is part of the reason why we’ve been so focused on coming up with ideas to “entertain” our guests outside the wedding and will be trying to welcome them to Philly in the best way possible (a post on guest bags later).

We want the City of Brotherly Love to love them back! (personal photo)

The final breakdown is by “side”. We split the guest list 50:50 and, in the end, it almost matched up exactly! There are also a number of folks who were arbitrarily assigned to a side (like those we worked with at the company where we met)…this will have to play into our decisions about seating at the church later.

So close, we can barely tell which side is which!

I hope I haven’t sufficiently bored you all with my data analysis and maybe even gave a few helpful tips / insights for those of you “waiting” or just about to send out your invites (exciting!).

How did your guest list break down? Did you (over) analyze the information?