Our set up: four or five low-key regional celebrations, all held in friends' backyards, to celebrate our nuptials.
Our dilemma: we were hoping to funnel people's enthusiasm for 'giving' the newlyweds things into helping us pull off our rather unorthodox wedding celebration tour (three states, four parties, coming to a city near you). To make that feasible, we were planning to use alternativegiftregistry.org, a website hosted by the Center for the New American Dream that allows you to ask your friends and family to 'give' things like a savory side dish for the San Francisco party, responsibility for minding the roasting pig at the Boston celebration, or taking responsibility for coordinating football tickets for the Madison shindig.
BUT, alternativegiftregistry.org is updating their site and will not be creating new accounts until late summer (i.e. sometime between the first and third celebration). Do you know of other sites that allow you to create a registry that isn't based on commercial products? Ideally, it would look something like:
Boston-Side Dishes: Cook some homemade food to accompany the roast pig Needs: 10 Has: 3
Park clean-up LA: Help us clean up the wreckage after the LA event Needs: 4 Has: 4
Without it, I feel like low key is going to spiral into planning nightmare. Do you have thoughts, ideas, suggestions, or powerful pharmaceuticals that can help?
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Anybody have a brilliant suggestion? (And don't say: "Ask a tech savvy friend to build you a website!" Just. Don't.)
Boob-tastic Lara Stone by Peter Lindbergh for Vogue China via Fashion Gone Rogue
some friends of mine did this on http://www.honeyfund.com/
ReplyDeleteIs your name really Hallie? I've never met another Hallie
ReplyDeleteThat's so sad to hear. We used Alternative Gift Registry for our wedding and I was so excited when I found it because as far as I could tell it really is the only site that's quite that free-form.
ReplyDeleteThat said, you could try making a Google form for people to fill out, with an attached spreadsheet that tracks who is doing what. This really isn't as easy, but it's easier than calling everyone and asking. You could make the resulting spreadsheet public to anyone who has the link, but not let them actually edit it, so that hopefully it would help people only sign up for things that are still available. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to make Google Docs do this automatically. The other option would be to go through responses as they come in and update a main site to only list the items you still need (yes, that would probably be a huge pain in the a**).
Not 100% sure if it's a perfect fit, but lotsahelpinghands.com may work for this purpose. A friend of mine used it to coordinate friends bringing by meals and keeping her company while she was on bed rest and then after she had her twins. Good luck with your celebrations! They sound like a blast!
ReplyDeleteI think you can use this to do it: http://www.merciregistry.com/
ReplyDeleteThe couple who created it custom built a registry and then decided to offer it to others. You can see their registry here as an example.
Use We Join In. Mostly people I know use it for office hour sign up sheets, but it'd work fine for this. You can label the rows by task and set limits to how many people can sign up in each cell. It won't have needs/has, but you could put the number of people you need in the task description and people could see how many people had already signed up. Unfortunately I don't think this would work well for object registries.
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to say I hope one of these ideas works because it's really lame that alternativeregistry.org is going to be closed for that long, and the type of wedding "tour" you're talking about sounds awesome.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't a perfect solution but you may be able to customize a site like www.honeyfund.com, its meant to have your guests contribute money for the honeymoon. I wonder if you could just fill out the things you need and leave the prices at $0. Good Luck!
ReplyDeleteIf none of the more specific solutions that people have offered above work, you could just use a doodle poll (www.doodle.com).
ReplyDeletecould you just assign tasks? or ask a designated person from each city to assign tasks for you?
ReplyDelete@Amanda- YES to Google docs! We used Google docs to compile addresses for everyone on our guest list. We used this address book template which was mass-emailed to our friends and family. As they updated their info, it was automatically added to a spreadsheet. Check out other wedding templates here under the Google docs tab. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteUse Basecamp for everything having to do with your life, including your wedding, and never look back.
ReplyDeleteWe used simple registry - you can put whatever you want on there with any kind of photo. We did stuff as well as honeymoon as well as "general gift". They take a 3 percent cut tho - but that seemed to be the norm everywhere I looked.
ReplyDeleteNot sure if they take on things like weddings, but the site volunteermatch.org is formatted like your example. Maybe they could at least point you towards a similar site?
ReplyDeleteIt's not as pretty-looking as most registry sites, but Doodle (doodle.com) lets you create a poll for free. You could create one poll for each event and have columns for side dishes (10), clean-up (4), etc. You can provide more explanations for each task at the top. Then guests type in their name and check off what they're doing, and they can also see what everyone else has signed up for.
ReplyDelete