Encouraging Wedding Wishes: A Guide to Maximising Guest Contributions!

You’ve gone to the effort to setup an online wishing well.

You’ve done some rough calculations on how much you expect to receive.

Then the day after your event you tally it all up and it’s…

Disappointing!

What went wrong? Do people hate me? Am I a bad person for choosing a wishing well?

It can be seriously disappointing when the funds fall short of what you expect.

Here are the most effective ways to make sure you maximise the money you get through your wishing well.

1. Setup your wishing well as early as possible

Some people leave setting up their wishing well to very last which is a huge mistake.

We get it. It’s very easy to setup an online wishing well which is often why it’s not high on the priority list.

But the thing is that the earlier you set it up, the sooner people will be able to start sending you money.

Why is that important?

Because some people are super organised and they will go out and buy you gifts as soon as they know about your event.

This means that if you’re slow to make the wishing well option available to them, it may be too late as they will have already made a purchase on your behalf and so the wishing well is effectively useless.

2. Give people plenty of notice

It’s all well and good to setup your wishing well 1 year before your actual event, but if you don’t tell people about it how are they supposed to know to use it?

Make sure you tell people that you’ve setup your online wishing well as soon as it’s ready so that people know immediately that the expectation is for them to give a cash donation, and not to buy an actual gift.

Those of your guests who are very well organised will often make their contribution as soon as they can which means you get to watch the funds start rolling in right away!

If your event is an expensive one (like a wedding) that can really take some of the anxiety away caused by all those big bills rolling in.

3. Give your guests gentle reminders

Not everyone is a super organised person especially when it comes to sending money to a wishing well.

So send out some gentle reminders periodically to those people who are yet to make a contribution.

You can do this via email, SMS, or use the built-in social sharing tools within your account to let people know.

Send the first reminders a few months before, and as the event draws closer, you could even send our weekly reminders to those remaining people.

Just be careful to only send reminders to people who haven’t contributed to your wishing well. As it will be very confusing for people who’ve already sent funds to then receive additional reminders along with everyone else.

4. Allow for the stragglers

Now we have to deal with the stragglers. The people who leave everything to the last minute.

We all know who these people are, and we can’t just forget about them.

If you’re using My Gift Registry for your wishing well, then you’re probably aware that your account has a 7 day grace period before it closes off.

This means that your account stays open to accept contributions for 7 more days beyond your actual event date.

That feature is designed to cater specifically for the stragglers who completely forget about their obligations until the actual day of your event, or a few days after the event once the hangover wears off.

It’s a very good idea to send these people a gentle reminder like we mentioned in step 3, a day or so after the event has passed.

In our experience it tends to create a whole new wave of funds rolling in!

Imagine waking up on Monday (when the wedding was on Saturday) to an SMS saying something like this…

“Hey [firstname] just wanted to say thanks so much for sharing our special day with us. We also wanted to say thanks for your generous contribution to our wishing well too! We’ll be leaving on our honeymoon tomorrow and your donation will really help us relax after such a hectic time. http://mygiftregistry.com.au/wishing-well”

Make sure you include the link to your wishing well in the message.

Once they realise that you’re thanking them for money that they’ve forgotten to send, they’ll commence their panic attack and use that link to send their contribution!

You might even find they give a little extra to make up for their tardiness.

Conclusion

Your online wishing well is one of the easiest, stress free elements of your event.

Follow these simple steps and you’ll find it can generate you a vast quantity of money and make your life easier!