Formal Invitations - to send or not to send?

[QuintanaV]

I mailed out STD's a year in advance that was also an informational booklet. I than plan on calling my family for RSVP's since they are NOT good at returning RSVP cards. Once I know who all is going, only those selected individuals will receive formal invitations like 4 months before the wedding.

 

I sent out 100 STD's and I can imagine about 40 will attend. I just don't want to spend more money on invitations to those already telling me that they can't go.

[terrihugg]

I'm in the same boat. We created video save the dates. But I'm trying to figure out if we should just send save the dates and no invites. 

 

We are having guests RSVP on the wedding website we made. 

[maridr2012]

We made an A list for those guests we absolutely wanted to/needed to invite, and a B list for those we would like to invite if we had enough space in our budget and venue. Save the dates postcards were sent out to the A list 9 months prior to wedding date. Formal invitations were sent out 5 months before wedding date, again, only to A list. Our RSVP date is 4 1/2 months before wedding date to give folks enough time to book and plan their trip. I'll start calling people 1 wk after the RSVP date if they never sent the response card. This gives me an opportunity to still send out invitations to the B list if we get enough declines, and those B listers won't feel left out. When I had the RSVP cards printed I had about 25 with a blank space so I can calligraphy the date in (for the B listers since their response date is different from A listers).

[Mufin1785]

we did STD and formal invites for the DW. 

 

Formal invites were important to my mom and she wanted to make sure that everybody including people who could not make the DW felt included and were not offended when they only received an invitation to the AHR.  Plus it is a lovely keepsake of your wedding day that you can frame with your pictures. 

[QuintanaV]

maridr2012 - That's a really great idea! I like it

[Kassi22]

We didn't do STD's. We did up a website and sent it out to everyone. We will send out formal invitations though, but not until about a month before the wedding. I want the formal invites to have all the details about the wedding day itself which I won't have ironed out until I deal with the wedding coordinator at the resort (ie. a month before)

[MissFifi]

We did an evite STD and travel details with the invitations mailed out a month later.  Everyone knew we were getting married in JA but they officially received the dates 9 months ahead of schedule. I really wanted to do a formal invitation because I loved the idea of boarding pass invitiations.

[JayKay]

We sent out our STDs about 11 months in advance.  We had everyone book by June so we never ever did send out a formal invite.  Rather we sent out an informal postcard with futher wedding information on it that wasnt included on our STDs. By not doing formal invites we saved a lot of money!

[FuturemrsD]

We are also planning for our wedding in October/November 2013 (waiting on TA for prices) and are sending out 'save the cash' luggage tags that I made on Word in the next few weeks (costing less than £10/$15 for 50). I want to let everyone know where and roughly when we will be getting married to give them enough time to save up. We will then be sending out formal invites (I love the boarding pass style invites) once I have the wedding date and other travel details confirmed. 

[2bmrstremblay]

We are going to do the STD's and the Invites at the same time. I am going to do magnets for the STDS and for the invites I am going to do a boarding pass idea. It will have a link to our wedding website on it but i thought it would be nice for people to have a little something on their fridge as a reminder.

 

Also I saw another bride on here who sent out postcards every couple of months with little sayings like: "Imagine in 250 days you will be sitting on the beach in the sun"

She said she sent them out about 4 times and the guests really liked it and were kept excited and involved!