Are you wondering – what does a wedding planner do? Have you been considering hiring a wedding coordinator but aren’t sure if it’s worth the cost? Are you unsure whether you need a coordinator or a planner, or if your venue coordinator is enough?

As an experienced Northern Virginia wedding photographer, we know firsthand how crucial it is to have at least a day-of coordinator throughout your wedding day in order to keep things running smoothly. We want to break down exactly why, and explain some misconceptions about coordinators/planners. We’ll be getting help right from the source! We’ve interviewed two of our favorite coordinators/planners in the greater DC area. They’ll help you understand their role on the wedding day and why you should consider hiring them.

Moriah Lemming is senior planner with The One Moment Events, a company that has had weddings featured in major publications like Style Me Pretty, Carats & Cake, Inspired By This, and more. Prior to working with The One Moment Events, Moriah was the venue coordinator at Oatlands Historic House and Gardens (one of the best wedding venues in Northern Virginia!). We worked with Moriah on a few weddings including Kasia and Matt’s vow renewal at Fleetwood Farm Winery and Grace and Peter’s wedding at Rust Manor.

Our second interviewee is Diana Ram Santiago with Passionate Weddings, which has had weddings featured in Tacari Weddings, Charm City Wed, and more. Diana leads a bilingual team to serve weddings of all different cultures. We worked with Diana on Evelyn and Trung’s micro wedding at the Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament in DC, as well as Evelyn and Trung’s larger vow renewal at Pinstripes Bethesda the following year. Read our interview below to answer the question – what does a wedding planner do?

The #1 reason to hire a wedding coordinator

From our experience as a wedding photographer and from the answers of both of our featured coordinators, the main reason to hire a wedding coordinator is to give yourself and your family members peace of mind on your wedding day. “A wedding coordinator will make sure that everything goes smoothly – so that you can enjoy your wedding, instead of enduring your wedding,” says Moriah. The last thing you want is to be putting out fires on your wedding day, or asking your friends and family to spend their time and effort working on making your day magical and missing out on the magic themselves. “Hiring a coordinator helps couples and their families experience a worry-free wedding day,” agrees Diana. “Having peace of mind on your wedding day is truly priceless.”

Moriah also points out that a coordinator isn’t just showing up on your wedding day and working from there. A coordinator is also going to work with you before the wedding to set up a successful plan. “There are so many factors that go into building a timeline that leads to a smooth and seamless event for you and your guests. Having an expert to guide you through this process is an often overlooked but crucial part of a stress free wedding.”

As a wedding photographer I also often assist our clients in managing their wedding day timeline. But we aren’t able to help with the little details that a professional coordinator will manage. Things like vendor arrival and set up times. “There are a ton of little details that go into the planning that you would never think to consider,” says Moriah. “Hiring someone who has done it before, [who] knows what to do and how to get it done, and [who] can guide you through the process leading up to your day can make all the difference in the world!”

Real ways wedding coordinators have made a difference

It’s easy to talk about the importance of a wedding coordinator in the abstract. But what about real life, tangible ways coordinators have saved the day? Oftentimes, the clients don’t even realize how many times their wedding coordinator prevented a major disaster on their wedding day!

On my own wedding day, we hired a coordinator who majorly saved the day. We realized just before the ceremony that the bubbles for our send-off from the church were accidentally left at my apartment 20 minutes away. Without the wedding coordinator, we would have had to pick one of two disappointing options… Either skip the bubble send-off that has been a tradition in my family for as long as I can remember, or ask a guest to skip our ceremony to get the bubbles. Instead, our coordinator stepped in. She was able to quickly take a key to my apartment, grab the bubbles, and come back before the end of our ceremony.

Moriah recalls a day she was able to think on her feet to save a wedding day from disaster. “The ceremony was supposed to be outside, but we moved it into the “air-conditioned” tent due to health concerns. It was still extremely hot in the tent, so the officiant cut the ceremony short to only 9 minutes. That left us with a cocktail hour that would be well over an hour. Normally, this would be fine, more time for photos! However, with the heat the guests were downing their drinks and everyone was getting way too drunk, way too fast. The kitchen wasn’t ready to serve dinner, so we couldn’t have everyone sit in their seats [in the air conditioned reception space] with nothing to do. So, we did some fast thinking, grabbed the parents and wedding party members who were giving toasts and let them know we needed them. We got the guests seated and did all the toasts before dinner service, instead of after. Everyone got some water, slowed down their alcohol consumption, and the rest of the wedding went much more smoothly!”

A great coordinator will also go above and beyond to make sure your day is perfect. Even when you think having a family member help out will save you some money. “We once had a wedding management client that assigned a family member to oversee the early morning breakfast and work with the off-site caterer before our contracted onsite arrival time,” recalls Diana. “At 7:00am on the day of the wedding, I received a call from one of the bridesmaids [who] said that the caterer was not onsite, the assigned aunt was not picking up her phone, and [a few] guests were waiting outside the breakfast room. We immediately called the caterer and headed to the venue to take action. Once we arrived, we rolled up our sleeves and helped the caterer [set up] to avoid any further delays.”

What makes a great wedding coordinator?

We hear a lot of couples say that they understand why they need a wedding coordinator. But they would rather save money and ask a family friend or extended family member instead. This is a huge responsibility to place on someone who isn’t a professional! “A lot of factors go into being a great wedding coordinator. You need to have a magical balance of patience, grace, and the ability to call people out if necessary.  Someone who agrees with everything the wedding couple says, instead of guiding them to the best solution, ends up over-promising and under delivering,” says Moriah. Diana agrees, “A great wedding coordinator knows how to wear multiple hats, communicate details effectively and has a tough skin.”

This “tough skin” is an essential part to being a great wedding coordinator. The coordinator is the person who has to make the couple’s plans a reality. Even when another vendor doesn’t have the same priorities, someone is disturbing the wedding, etc. “Wedding and event coordinators work with so many kinds of personalities,” Diana clarifies. “A professional coordinator with tough skin knows how to defuse high conflict situations and communication between a vendor, a family member or any uninvited guests.”

Moriah is on the same page as well – “To be a wedding coordinator you have to face any situation with a calm that spreads to others, a diplomatic tact in the face of a challenge, and the ability to see a problem and the solution before anyone else knows that problem exists.” Again, this is a BIG responsibility to put on the shoulders of your friend or family member. They really just want to enjoy your wedding day as a guest. Having the wrong person at the helm of your wedding day can lead to major disappointment when something goes wrong and they just can’t handle it properly.

Venue coordinators aren’t enough

A venue coordinator is a great resource for couples before and during their wedding day. We’ve worked with some excellent venue coordinators who did their very best to make the couples’ priorities a priority for them as well! And most venue coordinators know that this is what helps get them good reviews and make their venue successful. That said, at the end of the day, the venue coordinator isn’t enough to rely on for your wedding day coordination.

One place where a wedding day can get off track because the couple relies exclusively on their venue coordinator is before the ceremony even happens – during the “getting ready” portion of the day. If you’re not spending your entire pre-ceremony day at the venue where the coordinator works, then choosing not to hire a separate coordinator for the day means you’re relying on yourselves and your wedding party to stay on track while you get ready for the ceremony. That means coordinating breakfast and/or lunch, ensuring the HMUA is staying on schedule, confirming that the florist is on time and delivering everything they’re responsible for, adjusting the timeline when a wedding party member is running late or you can’t do your father-daughter first look because dad went straight to the church instead of your hotel.

There are so many moving pieces that the venue coordinator doesn’t have anything to do with, that a hired wedding coordinator will manage. “For example, we create a hair and makeup timeline for your wedding party. Our team steam bridal party gowns. We help display all your details shot for your photographer to capture in your getting ready suite. It’s our role to manage transportation logistics to the ceremony site and /or venue,” says Diana.

Moriah knows firsthand the role of a venue coordinator on a wedding day because she used to be one. ““A venue coordinator’s job is to take care of their venue, not take care of the client,” she clarifies. “They may be able to assist you with many of the important things, such as [cueing] you down the aisle, and moving guests between spaces, but they are coordinating things from the venue perspective. You need someone that will coordinate your day on your behalf. Someone who knows every detail about every decoration, and every vendor, and will be your advocate throughout the day. There are some really great venue coordinators out there, but in the end you need someone to coordinate for YOU not the venue.”

This is entirely true in our experience as well. We’ve photographed more than a few wedding days where the couple relied on their venue coordinator exclusively but didn’t realize what they were missing out on. Nobody was there to advocate for them when the venue set up the tables in the wrong configuration, that one of their signage items was missing, or that nobody was around to coordinate the big send-off because the venue coordinator was nowhere to be found at the end of the night.

Wedding Coordinator vs. Wedding Planner

A crucial difference to note in the wedding industry is hiring a wedding coordinator vs. hiring a wedding planner. They’re often used interchangeably, but there’s a big difference! Wedding coordination (often also called wedding management) is almost always exclusively limited to planning a timeline and executing it. “A planner will book your vendors, create your design, and plan your wedding day with your input and guidance,” Moriah notes. The planner is an invaluable resource in vetting your vendors, reviewing contracts and invoice schedules, getting creative to keep your wedding design on-theme and unique, and so much more. “From venue scouting, vendor research, proposal review, event design, RSVP management, we manage it all,” Diana agrees. “We are fully invested in finding couples their dream team of vendors and help capture their vision.”

Having a wedding planner means having extra peace of mind that your wedding day will go smoothly. ‘Anyone who tells you they can show up on your wedding day and manage it smoothly, is lying,” states Moriah. “Details will be missed, things will go wrong, and the likelihood of the wedding couple having to deal with a stressful situation is very high.” A wedding coordinator will do their best to manage the wedding day with the information they’ve been given. They’ll typically meet with the couple to go over the timeline and wedding details once or twice in advance of the wedding day. But they’re still relying on your plans and the information you share with them about the wedding day. So if you forgot to tell them about part of the wedding day plans, misunderstood a contract from another vendor, or ordered signage too late for it to arrive on time for your wedding, the coordinator can only help minimize the issue as much as they reasonably can. With a hired planner, those responsibilities are on the expert. And they know going into the wedding day exactly what your expectations are.

What does a wedding planner do?

Hiring a wedding planner will make a huge difference in your wedding day. Many of Diana’s clients are bilingual, and among them there are clients who struggle a bit more with English – a major difficulty when planning a wedding in the DC area. “Planning a wedding where English was not their first language was definitely challenging for them,” Diana recalls. “We worked with the couple from the very beginning to find them a venue, finalize a color palette, budget management and rehearsal. At the end of their wedding, we were known as their bilingual planner fairy godmother. It was truly a memorable and rewarding experience.” Afterward, Diana knew the wedding plans like the back of her hand. There was no worry that she would jump into the wedding day as a coordinator and be concerned that something was lost in translation between the couple and a vendor, because Diana had handled it all for them!

The impact a planner makes can also be more subtle yet still memorable. For Moriah, one of her most memorable moments as a wedding planner came from a seemingly small touch that made a big impact on the wedding design. For this wedding, Moriah knew from her relationship with the couple as their planner that embracing color and whimsy were the couple’s priority, and that they had wanted to invest in florals but they were still on a budget. “On the wedding day, we ended up with a bucket of extra flowers and a little extra time so I decided to do something special for them,” she says. “The venue had a sheer curtain with strings of fairy lights behind the sweetheart table, so my team and I tied all of the extra blooms to the lights and created a colorful flower wall behind the couple. It [looked] like it was raining flowers! The couple was so happy and they really deserved something extra special. I was really proud that I could give them that.” We can attest to this as we photographed this wedding – you can see the flower wall pictured to the right!

You can have a beautiful, memorable, unique wedding day without investing in a wedding planner. But often, it’s the creativity and expertise of the wedding planner working with you toward your unique vision that makes the biggest impact – both on the final design of your wedding day and on your mental load when you outsource so many of the wedding day tasks so that you can focus on enjoying the experience.

Did you hire a wedding coordinator or a wedding planner? Share your experience below!

And in case you were curious – yes, all photos featured in this blog were from weddings coordinated and/or planned by Moriah or Diana and photographed by us!