You’ve taken the most romantic picture of you and your partner kissing (or perhaps doing something dumb and hilarious) you’ve digitally framed them with the iconic “Save The Date” message and then looked back at your guest list. Let’s say you need twenty-five copies. About halfway through the printing, the printer run out of ink, so you upload the invite into a cloud storage and run to the nearest Office Depot or Kinko’s, only to find that they charge three dollars per copy to print. After all this time, money and trouble. The question enters your mind:
Is it really necessary to print these things today?
How many people have personal email addresses? Wedding budgets are already tight as it is, and how much cheaper would it be to simply send all of these digitally? That combined with you’re probably looking at doing it a second time with the formal Wedding Invitations and the splinter of doubt gnaws at you all the more.
Is this really worth it?
Well, consider this. Save The Date cards are typically reserved for your out-of-town guests (mainly immediate family and closest friends). While they’re most likely people to be informed of your wedding and kept in the loop on updates, Save The Date cards are often the an informal announcement of marriage and the main way guests are reminded that the wedding in drawing near (hence posting it on the fridge). This may seem trivial, but for many it’s a constant reminder that you’ve personally considered their presence for one of (if not the) most important day(s) of your life.
That sticks with people. Not to sound like one of the many people that complain about technology disconnecting us (seriously, there’s no shortage of them), but a bit of that magic is lost when they open their email to find their name cc’d amongst two dozen other names. Ultimately, it’s the same thing. You were sending these to all of the same people anyways, right? But it does lose that personal touch, and–at the risk of being blunt–having the Save The Date invitations languish in an email folder increases the chance someone on the guest list will forget about it.
However, we do recognize that weddings are costly and people generally don’t have a large amount of unstructured for planning and preparation. There’s certainly an argument to be made for both the convenience and money saving that comes with just sending everything out as an email. But if you end up going this route, consider doing a compromise and saving one set of invitations for the printer (as in either The Save The Date, or The Formal Invitations), especially if you’re looking to have a large wedding with formal guest lists and such. The mailed invitations will make it simpler for your guests (and harder for crashers). Your guests will end up having one mailed and one digital invitation –a fine compromise between 20th century tradition and 21st century streamlining.
