saundra hadley planning forever events

i am NOT a wedding coordinator

I would like to explain why calling a professional wedding planner a “coordinator” is diminishing and not at all in my marketing vocabulary.

I’m a planner. Or a manager of events if the clients have done most of the planning. Not a coordinator. It makes my heart drop to hear another wedding professional address me as a coordinator when I have spent hundreds of hours in strategic planning.

The definition of coordinator is: “a person whose job is to organize events or activities and to negotiate with others in order to ensure they work together effectively.”

dictionary.com

We can all agree that by that definition, those activities are definitely in a daily wheelhouse of a wedding planner. Heck, that’s in the daily wheelhouse of every parent!

If that is all I did, then cool … brand me a coordinator.

so what do planners do?

We offer SO MUCH more than that. For me, it’s over 16 years of real-life experience in planning events of all sizes. I’m expected to give advice and guide my clients to be sure that they are not making financial mishaps. I look 10 steps ahead in the planning so the event flows easily. I have extensive knowledge of budgeting, the psychology of events, etiquette advice. Design. And mega hours spent on continual education for our industry with trends.

The language does matter. It’s either elevating my profession or leaving it stagnant or worse, reduces all my hard work. Am I a photographer because I have an iPhone? A pastry chef because I bake cookies? A filmmaker because I uploaded to TikTok? A doctor because I removed a splinter? Okay, I just wanted to be sure you were still reading …

hello, couples

That is why we do not offer services that use the wording, “Day of Coordination” or “Month of Coordination/Planning”.

I have in the past, they are buzz words and high trafficked keyword searches. But the reality is, we don’t offer that service. PFE has never shown up just on the day of the wedding and coordinated the events. PFE has in the past, but no longer starts only four weeks (or month of) before your wedding to “coordinate”. And I’ll tell you why …

Because it’s a setup for failure – for my team. It is extremely stressful to be a professional in a situation at someone’s one-and-only celebration and finding multiple things that are very wrong and you know that if you were part of the decision process early on, you could have helped your client avoid these mishaps. We are very, well-known in our area for our service and the events that we produce, and the reflection of poorly executed events — well, it would be all PFE’s fault even if it was out of our control.

the modern wedding management service

That is why we have a Modern Wedding Management Service and it is more powerful than the other Day of or Month of services.

You plan your wedding with your family and besties, then several months in advance we will meet and go through everything. AND, because we know that you do need some help along the way we will add in some planning hours on the front end, field your questions along with your planning process and INCLUDE other totally awesome and completely needed important tasks … like seriously, you’re going to love them.

I hope this post has helped explain a movement in my industry (for quite some time) to help move us forward. And listen, if you ARE a wedding coordinator and offer services such as; 4 hours at the wedding reception or you’ll come to just the ceremony to walk them down the aisle … awesome. You do you. There is nothing wrong with that, you are truly a coordinator.

And if you’re planning a wedding, please consider giving us a call or email.
I would love to learn about your upcoming celebration.

feature photo cred: hip-n-humble.com

plan on!

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