Yes, it’s been a LONG time since we wrote anything.  We’ve been busy!  Brooke changed jobs in July - she’s now leading the development of a social media listening practice at Motif, a business process outsourcing firm.  Toby has been writing not 1, but 2 books, and traveling to exotic locales like New Zealand to talk at conferences.  On top of all of this, we’ve been planning our wedding.  Our first blog post in over 6 months is about wedding planning - but don’t worry, we’ll write another non-wedding post soon.

We decided not to use paper invitations.  This was partly for environmental purposes, but largely for convenience. It’s also been a unique way for us to express ourselves.  A recent experience reinforced this decision.  We were at a friend’s house and saw two wedding invitations on her fridge.  They were exactly the same design, but slightly different colors and papers.  One of the brides was there as well, and it was kind of sad to watch her compare the two invitations (perhaps wondering whether she had selected the right colors, if she should have splurged for the raised fonts).  We knew for sure at that point that we wanted to create something that was totally us.

Our invitation process was:

1) A save the date video.  The combo of a Flip and iMovie makes it easy.  And we had a lot of fun working together to map out and film the scenes. We got really great feedback from our guests - for some of them, it was the first time they had really “seen” us together.  You can check it out here.

2)  Electronic RSVPs.  For wedding invitations, we focused our efforts on custom designing our website.  One big deviation from tradition: we created an electronic RSVP form on the homepage of our website. It’s been great.  We get instant gratification - the responses started coming in immediately after we sent out an email.  And, we’ve simplified our own RSVP tracking.  We also think it made things easier for our friends by allowing them to use communication mechanisms they normally use (the mailbox can feel really far away sometimes).  As our friend Tanya says, “death to the paper invite!”

3) College facebook-style guest list - This is a fun way for our guests to see who’s coming to the wedding.  We’ve got pictures of confirmed guests, and you can filter the lists to see which of our guests are family, Wellesley, MIT, Stanford, etc.  We hope that it’s fun for our single friends in particular :).  Toby built this off of a Google spreadsheet.  He promises to make it open for others to use soon - when he does, he’ll reference it on his blog.

We’ve been having fun experimenting with ways to incorporate technology into our wedding. If you have more ideas, please share!