Welcome Brochures

Though we had already sent out two newsletters in the months leading up to our trip, both Girl Scout Wife and I had some lingering concerns about the plans being made by our families, and wanted to help everyone feel comfortable and welcome at our destination wedding. For a while now, Girl Scout Wife has been keen on the idea of doing welcome bags for our families. While there are many challenges in creating welcome bags for a wedding taking place all the way across the country, I'm instead going to focus on the parts that I had the biggest hand in, in this case the welcome brochure.

Getting started on creating a brochure for our wedding welcome bags was easy, since Microsoft Word and the Internet combine to have a bevy of templates available for use in all kinds of brochures. The real challenge was, once faced with six folded panels of text, what information to include? We wanted the brochures to be useful and informational, but we also had to keep in mind that, by the time our families received their welcome bags, they would already be in Florida and all of their plans would already be locked in.

The first page was simple, since it would serve as the front cover of the brochure and didn't need to be packed with text. We also included our cell phone numbers and a spot to write our room number at the Boardwalk on the front page, so that if any of our friends or family had any questions they would be able to contact us with relative ease. Another page could be taken up by the information on WedPics, which none of our family will know about yet. Of course, we'd want a wedding day itinerary (after all, it's the most important event of the trip), and even though some of the folks wouldn't be getting their brochures and welcome bags until a few days into the trip, I figured it couldn't hurt to list the other, pre-wedding activities and provide a few details. Another thing I'd seen other people do in their welcome letters was to provide the contact information for various information and service numbers (things like Disney dining, cab companies, etc.). That left us with one panel to fill, and I knew quickly what I wanted to put there: a listing of everyone attending the wedding. Obviously this is something that's only possible with a small wedding like ours, but I figured, since our families are unfamiliar with each other, having a cheat sheet with everyone's names on it would be useful.

The end result was pretty clean and simple, and I think it got the job done. Everyone seemed to like having the relevant information, and I know that some of our family members seemed glad to be able to reference it from time to time. Was it worth the effort that went into it? I don't know. But I'd rather provide that information to everyone and have them not need it than leave someone out in the cold.