How to use Airtable for Wedding Planning

After 10 months of being engaged, and countless hours of planning, we had a fantastic wedding with around 190 guests. Not only was it a success because we officially got married (woohoo!) but the guests had a great time. From the start, Allison and I wanted to plan the wedding around the guests, not us.

We wanted to make sure that everyone that mattered to us was invited and taken care of. That meant being incredibly organized so we wouldn’t forget anyone, and make sure their needs were taking care of.

Enter Airtable.

I’ve been a huge fan of this software for a couple years now. Some of you may have heard me talk about it, but here’s your chance to see really how powerful it is, especially for wedding planning.

Why I Chose Airtable

Google Sheets is a viable option for wedding guest list management, but it felt like I was hacking together a solution with Google Sheets, whereas Airtable already had all of the features built in (like filtering, sorting, grouping, etc.) We ended up using Google Sheets for a few other things like the budget, vendor list, and schedule so that we could share them with the family and wedding party.

Airtable hit the sweet spot for guest list management. There are other online solutions for guest list management like theknot.com, but they didn’t offer the flexibility of adding more fields and specific customization.

Here’s a short list of reasons I went with Airtable:

• Beautiful UI/UX
• Easy to create views with different filters (e.g. we could switch between views of “RSVPed Yes” and “RSVPed No” very easily. More on this later.)
• Integration with Slack
• Kanban view for easy table assigning
• Grouping fields
• Mobile friendly app
• Flexibility in field creation

I copied the Airtable base that we used for our wedding and filled it with fake names so you can copy it for your own use! Here’s what it looks like:

Getting started

1. Create an Airtable account and login (disclaimer: I get Airtable credit if you sign up with that link)
2. Open up my Wedding Planning Template
3. Click Copy base in the top right, which will open Airtable in a new tab
4. Add base and then select it from your list of bases. Now the template is in your account.
5. Share the base with your fiancé by clicking Share in the top right
6. Start adding your guests!

Adding guests

We ended up using each row (or record, as Airtable calls them) for one person (including children), rather than families. For example, if we invited a family of four, we added each person as a record: John Doe, Jane Doe, Jesse Doe, Sarah Doe. Each person had their own record. Instead of doing something like “The Doe Family” as a record. I think it could go either way: families or individuals. If you decide to go with families, then make sure you update the Total # in your party field so you can get an accurate count of guests later on.

To start, Allison and I added everyone we could possibly think of that we would want to attend the big event. We didn’t start to narrow it down until everyone was added. It’s helpful to add info about the person to the notes field, especially for people only one of you knows or extended family members that you haven’t met.

The hardest part was narrowing our list down, and we ended up using a 2 list system: A-list and B-list. If we had it our way, and we had unlimited money, we would’ve invited everyone, but that’s not realistic. Most people understand the difficulty in guest lists for weddings, so don’t beat yourself up too much over putting people on the B-list. After RSVPs roll in and you have some room left over, you can go through your B-list to see who else you can accommodate.

Working with multiple views

This is an essential part of using Airtable. A view is a specific way of looking at data when filters are applied to a table. For example, let’s say we only want to see the people who have “RSVPed Yes”. I would create a new view, call it “RSVPed Yes” and add a filter that only displays records where RSVP is “Heck yes!”. If you went with the individual option instead of families, then you can easily see the number of people who have RSVPed Yes by looking down in the bottom left of the window where it says something like “53 records”. If each record is an individual, then you have 53 people who have RSVPed yes. The count shows up on every view, which is another reason to go with the individual records instead of family records.

The template includes a lot of different views, but you can easily create your own. To see the views, click on the view name in the top left, like this:

Or press Cmd + Shift + K on a Mac or Ctrl + Shift + K on a PC to open up the views

To edit or create your own view, open up the views list and click on one of the “Add view” options. Most of the time you’ll want the Grid view, but with the table assignments I recommend going with the Kanban view so you can drag and drop guests to different tables.

Kanban view. Drag-and-drop the people to assign them to a table. We found it helpful to zoom out (CMD + — or Ctrl + — ) to see more tables.

Exporting names and emails for save-the-dates

We decided to go with emails for save-the-dates instead of paper to save some money and time. We used Paperless Post because they have a feature where guests can enter their physical address (disclaimer: this is a referral link. If you signup you get 25 free coins and I get 5 coins). This saved us a TON of time because we only had to add emails to Airtable (which are a lot easier to find).

After you narrow down your A-list and added all of the emails for the people in the list, go to the A-list view and click on the three little dots near the top and click on Download CSV:

Open up the CSV file in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Delete all of the columns except Guest and Email. If you entered people as individuals instead of families, then you’ll probably want to go through and change people into families. That way you email only one person, which is cheaper with Paperless Post (they charge per email).

Create your Save-The-Date card in Paperless Post and when you’re on the final page, there will be an option to Import Contacts. Upload your CSV file that you cleaned up earlier.

Add the RSVP form to your website

After you send out the invites, you’ll want a way for guests to RSVP. You can have the responses go directly into Airtable! Here’s how to do it:

• Go to the Wedding RSVP view (see above on how to go to different views)
• Click on Share form near the top
• Click on Embed this form on your site
• A new window in your default browser will open up.
• I suggest turning on Autosize height for the form. That way you won’t have a separate scroll bar within the form.
• Copy the Embed Code and paste it into your website. If you’re using something like Squarespace or Theknot.com website, then look for a way to add custom code or form to the page

Customizing the RSVP form

• Customize the form to your liking by dragging fields from the left to the form on the right. If you want to add more fields to the form then you’ll need to create them first in one of the other views.
• To customize the RSVP options (“Heck Yes!” and “Unfortunately No”) then go to one of the other views, find the RSVP column in the top, click the dropdown arrow and click on Customize Field Type. Change the text in the boxes and click Save.
• After you customize you don’t need to update the form code on your website, it will update automatically.

Managing and updating RSVPs

Unfortunately, when guests use the RSVP form, a new record is created with the form fields. Airtable doesn’t have a feature to lookup and update records with a form, so the only functionality of the Airtable form is to create a new record. You could either leave the RSVPs as-is, or you can manually update the already existing record when they RSVP and delete the record that was created by the form submit. Here’s how it works:

• Guest submits the form, e.g. John Doe for 2 people
• A new record is created in Airtable with their form entry (Guest: John Doe, Total # in Party: 2, RSVP: Heck Yes)
• Go to Airtable and lookup John Doe’s original record and mark their RSVP as “Heck Yes”
• Find their spouse, e.g. Jane Doe, and mark them as “Heck Yes” as well (John RSVPed for 2 people so I’m assuming he has a spouse)
• Delete the record that was created (you’ll know it was the one from the form because most of the other fields like email and address will be missing because those weren’t submitted on the form)

Extra: Integrate Airtable with Slack

Every time a record is updated, you can have a notification posted in Slack. This is especially great when people start to RSVP so that both you and your fiancé can see who’s RSVPing.

• Create a Slack Team for you and your spouse
• Add your fiancé to the team
• Create a #wedding channel
• Go to Airtable and click on the title of the Base at the very top
• Click on Slack notifications
• Connect to your Slack team and select the #wedding channel

Here’s how it shows up in Slack when someone submits the RSVP form (I blurred out the names):

Using Airtable for venue, caterer, and hotel research

Not only can you use it for guests, but you can use it to research venues, caterers and night-of-hotels. I left a lot of the data in there just in-case you are looking for a wedding near Santa Barbara or the Santa Cruz area. Full disclosure: we went with Rancho San Antonio in Buellton, CA for the venue and Island View Catering. They were both amazing! We had multiple guests say it was some of the best wedding food they have ever had.

Conclusion

I hope this was a helpful guide! Airtable really did make our lives easier as we were planning for the wedding, and I hope it helps you as well! Let me know if you have any questions.