Day Of Coordinator

If you have it in your budget, I would definitely recommend booking one. I was adamant on not having one until I thought about who is gonna meet with all the vendors the morning of, who will stay to clean up after we leave, etc. Definitely don't want those tasks to fall on family members who should be enjoying the day too!

Depending on the size of your wedding and the amount of people you have in your life to help out, you may or may not have to get a Day of Coordinator.

Day of Coordinators usually do the program flow on the day of your wedding. They make sure that your vendors come on time and are present, follow the set up timeline from ceremony to reception, supervise/decorate/set up/clean up (if your caterers do not) your venue, making sure that all vendors set up correctly, and many more things to make your day less stressful.

If you do not have anyone who can personally fill this role and you think you need the extra hand to make your wedding flow better, then yes, I suggest a Day of Coordinator.

For mine, I have a church person who I know personally who has a knack for doing program flow and floor directing so I have enlisted her help to coordinate my wedding as a wedding to gift to me and my FH. So far it has been the best decision for my FH and I.

I am not sure how much Day of Coordinators run in Ohio, but here in (expensive) Southern California I have seen the cheapest at 900 and the most expensive to be about 2000ish.

Best of luck on deciding this option for your wedding and best wishes on your wedding day!

We did not hire one but we did have a family friend volunteer to be ours. She organizes events for her church, nascar, girl scouts etc and she rocks at it so we obviously have full confidence in her ability to handle keeping the ice bucket filled and drink dispensers filled lol. She is helping a little with the prep the day before and the decorating/setup the day of as well. We will be gifting and tipping well but she is not charging us.

I'd highly recommend getting one. We ended up going with a month of coordinator because of pricing and liking the idea of passing everything over to her a month before the wedding, and that was $1,200, minus 10% for finding her at a bridal shower. She'll follow up with all our vendors, make sure we make payments and headcounts on time, and run our rehearsal. Day of, she'll be at the venue early to coordinate all the vendors arrivals and set up all the décor we've made/rented from her. She (and her assistant) will make sure everything's ready to go, make sure the timeline is moving as expected, and tear everything down at the end of the night. There's no way I'd want to handle all this without her. If you can't fit a DOC into your budget, I'd try to get a venue where you can set up super early and tear down the next morning - making your friends and family come early or stay afterwards to handle the workload isn't great.

I definitely recommend it!! I wasn’t going to hire one, but my venue was a state park and I didn’t have anyone really to overall manage our day and was worried that I was going to have to do it, and didn’t want to worry about it! SO, I sucked it up and hired one, she was there for 6 hours and I DONT REGRET IT. She took care of everything, including the ceremony set up, timeline management, guest monitoring (making sure they weren’t bored or foodless during cocktail hour), family and bridal party gathering for photos and for the grand entrance. She was amazing!! We didn’t have to worry about a thing the whole day, because she just handled it!! I definitely recommend it. It made our day totally carefree knowing that she was managing things.

Haven't had my wedding yet, but I hired one and think it is going to be a great decision. She takes over at a month out and will take care of communication with vendors, setting up a timeline, run the rehearsal, directing vendors and set-up as it is needed, and best of all she will take care of getting gifts and cards to a safe spot at the end of the night and take care of any clean-up. Just knowing that I nor anyone at the wedding would need to do any of that made the stress melt away. I don't want any friends or family working at my wedding. My DOC is $800. She seems to be starting out but has a few years of experience and also has experience as an events manager at a catering business. She gets glowing reviews as well. I could have went with someone more expensive but I had no doubts that this person would do a great job. So if you are concerned about price maybe look for some people who newer to coordinating and see if they may be a good fit.

I'm an event planner professionally and have done day of coordination as a side gig in the past. As a DOC, I created schedules for the day, managed vendors, made sure things were running on time (and adjusted timelines, communicating with vendors when they didn't), cleaned up decor, etc. I originally wasn't going to get one for my wedding but realized that I didn't want to be worries about all those tiny details on my wedding day! Ours was a service offered through my caterer, and we are paying $700 (I usually charged between $750-$1000 depending on the size and scope of the wedding).