How to hire your Central Oregon wedding planner

Congratulations!! You are newly engaged and starting the wedding planning process. If you have narrowed your destination wedding search to Central Oregon, you might be wondering if you need a wedding planner and when to hire one. We’re here to answer all your frequently asked questions about hiring a Central Oregon wedding planner! We are honored to be in the top three Best Planners Outside Portland in 2023 by Oregon Wedding Day. Since 2019, we have planned 92 weddings in Central Oregon and are so excited to help you on this journey.

The best wedding planners in Central Oregon have these 5 things in common:

They have a team

When you hire a planning team, you have layers of support and experience built in. This team allows for redundancies and back up plans. What if your lead planner is sick or has an emergency? When you hire a planner on a team, you have someone who can seamlessly step in and know the systems without missing a beat. If the team is a strong one, you won’t know the difference between planners because they work cohesively.

2. They work months in advance

For partial planning or full service planning, it’s best to hire your planner 9-18+ months before the wedding. Of course there are exceptions, but this timeframe is the sweet spot for helping couples be the most successful! So if your wedding is in a year or more, now is the perfect time to hire a planner! For Wedding Management, you can typically get the most value from your planner with 6 or more months of working together.

Tetherow Resort Wedding

3. They are insured

We exclusively work with licensed, insured vendors… and you should too. Our couples don’t want to DIY their day; they want to be guests at their own wedding. When you hire professional vendors, you can trust that they know how to problem solve and they are connected to other vendors in the community which helps create redundancies. We are slightly obsessed with redundancies because the success of your wedding day should never hinge on a single individual. It’s all about teamwork. Professional, licensed vendors on your team are the best way to ensure seamless execution of the big day! And it helps protect your investment and your peace of mind when they are, for lack of a better word, legit.

4. Their work is everywhere online

It shouldn’t be hard to find your planner tagged in images from venues, photographers, and other vendors. Their online portfolio on instagram and their website should be robust with current images that represent their brand. Our perspective is that it’s important to work with a planner who has planned a wedding at your venue before and has good working relationships with the venue managers. For newer planners wanting to build their portfolio at a certain venue, they can put in the time and effort to plan a styled shoot or network with the community to build trust. These are all great signs that your planner is serious about their work!

5. They will coach you from Day one

Our Wedding Management package gets you resources from the day you sign. We give all of our couples a digital planning platform, a robust checklist for each phase of planning, a platform to build your timeline and layout, and an initial budget meeting so you can move forward putting down deposits with confidence. Even if you only need coordination on the day itself, Wedding Management means you have us available from day one.