give it

Snow, wind and rain... plus a great start to our wedding shows

Just got back from our first wedding show of the Spring, The Scottish Wedding Show in Edinburgh. Scotland is one of our 'hotspots' for couples using our wedding lists and we love the show we go to each year in Edinburgh - we have some great conversations and get great feedback and this year was no exception.

More couples had thought about having a charity wedding list and we got a much better reaction this year to The Scottish Wedding List - we'd only just gone live last time we were there but this year have an even stronger line-up of charities on the service - charities like Alzheimer Scotland, Cornerstone Community Care and Quarriers have been joined by others including Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland, Turning Point Scotland and Scottish International Relief (and we still have a couple more expected to be joining soon).

While in Scotland I couldn't help heading to the hills for a walk and headed to Perthshire for a spot of hill-walking in the snow - on occasions the views were great but (see the inset picture) at times I was reliant on my compass as I could barely see more than a few yards!

We've got two major three-days shows to come in two of the next three weekends (both in London) - The Designer Wedding Show and The National Wedding Show - I'm rounding up the volunteers!

Andy 

Everybody say 'aahhh'....

Now I'm not saying that we get emotionally attached to the couples who hold a wedding list with us, and nor am I saying that some of them may get attached to us, but we're only human, and it's amazing how being just a small part of someone's big day can really make you feel close!

It feels really good when some of them keep in touch and let us know how thing's are going - Jo and Chris have just sent us photos of their gorgeous daughter Isabella.

Jo and Chris used The Alternative Wedding List early in 2007 and Isabella arrived, 7 weeks early, in November - I know all babies look lovely but I think Isabella looks lovelier than most!

Andy

Christmas is coming...

We're already having a much busier December than last year. Although fewer people this year have signed up for The Alternative Christmas List (works like our wedding lists, your friends and family 'buy' one of the donations to charity rather than buy you a pair of socks) more people are actually using theirs when they do sign up - we've previously had lots of people who signed up for a Christmas list but then realised they were the ones who were going to be without presents so didn't actually use it. This year it seems that more people are realising that this is really the best sort of 'charity Christmas' to have, i.e. where you forsake presents YOU would have received rather than simply buying your family a charity gift they may not want (although obviously doing both, if your family approve, is even better!).

Having said that, we've also had quite an uplift of donations through our 'one-off' charity gift service Gifts 4 Good (where you make your donation instead of buying a physical gift and, instead of all the expense of gift cards, envelopes, postage etc, you just get a nice simple emailed PDF to send to the 'recipient'). The uplift started in November, and December's already our best month for the service so far. It's always been a bit of a 'sideline' as most people still seem to want something physical to show for their charity gift but maybe the whole 'green' angle is helping as well (having done the right thing why not go the whole hog and avoid wasting even more money).

My favourite piece of festive fare this Christmas has been from the charity Buglife, one of the recent additions to The Green Gift List. They've teamed up with children from St Augustine’s Junior School, Peterborough, to record a new version of a traditional Christmas song – ‘The Twelve Bugs of Christmas’. You can hear the song and see the accompanying film by clicking on this link: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_4-Bomnkd1w. Well worth a listen!

Andy

Our last wedding show this year

We exhibited at our final show of the year yesterday, the last of the season's gay wedding shows. Great fun and quite relaxed - one of our favourite acts of these (or indeed any) shows are The Three Waiters. Pretending to be waiters at your event/wedding they suddenly burst into song, and at the shows they also provide a little entertainment to keep us wide awake.

It was also great that one of our registered couples came along and said hi - Lyn and Deb get hitched in March and had a few things left to find - great news that they'd already decided on their gift list!

On the charity front - lots happening! Suddenly a few we've been asking to come onboard are saying yes so lots of work in letting them know how things work, how we can get them setup on the gift lists, and then finally working on the details ('gifts' etc) that will actually become part of the lists. We're trying to get as many of the new charities sorted by the new year as that's when we tend to get a big increase in next year's marrying couples signing up. Last week however we also had a charity, that we've been talking to for a year that we wanted to try and raise money for through our Scottish gift lists, come back to us and let us know that they weren't going to join up - always a dissapointment after so much work but it just means the door is open for another.

Andy

Wedding shows = exhaustion

We're coming to the end of the Autumn wedding shows that we attend. They're great fun but absolutely exhausting - a typical three day show involves Thursday set-up followed by three solid 8-hour days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Over the last few weeks we've been to The National Wedding Show at Earls Court in London and the NEC in Birmingham as well as The Designer Wedding Show in Battersea Park, London.

Piccy is of one of our volunteers, Lauren, at Earls Court.

We've got two more to go in November, one in Manchester, one in Brighton, both are Gay Wedding Shows - based on our experience of previous years shows they'll both be great fun as they tend to be more relaxed than other events (fewer mother-in-laws).

As we don't get let out that often we find all the shows are really good for getting a sense of how couples are taking to the idea of having a charity wedding list and getting feedback on lots of different aspects of the various services (types of charities, how it's used etc). From when we first started going to wedding shows more than three years ago (when we first launched The Alternative Wedding List) we've found that more couples have heard of the concept (not necessarily obvious as it's a new group of marrying couples every year) but also that more have already made their decision (even though it's often a 'no' most are kind enough not to give us our leaflets straight back, even though we prefer it if they do!). The conversations with couples who are thinking about going for it have become even more in-depth over the years - they're really good for challenging us about how we're going about things.

Popular discussion this Autumn was around The Green Gift List, our newest gift list service with a range of environmental and conservation charities - very topical!

Andy