What they are – Insert cards usually included with your wedding invitations. These allow guests to indicate whether or not they will be attending and to communicate meal choices for a sit down dinner. They also allow single guests to provide you with the name of the guest they will be bringing if you are giving them the option to do so.
Do you need them? – Etiquette technically dictates that guests respond to your wedding invitation in a handwritten note using their own stationery and postage. But in today’s hurried world providing response cards is the considerate way to go. Besides being a convenience for your guests, they will make less work for you. They are an organized way for you to keep track of who has replied and they will probably mean you have less people to track down at the deadlines for your vendors.
Other Tips – Include postage on your response cards, if you use them. Make it easy for your guests to reply in a timely manner and make things easier for yourself. Take a completed invitation to the post office to be weighed before purchasing postage. Invitations returned due to insufficient postage can put a huge crimp in your plans and be a costly mistake both in time and money. Ask a postal employee to assist you in hand canceling the postage particularly if your invitations have embellishments, ribbons and other special design elements. Running them through a machine to cancel them can damage some of these elements and cause creases and smudges.
