Why Tapestry Uses Notion as a Planning Tool
We were introduced to Notion as a solution for updating our Planning Portal through Stacey of Monday Made. And OMG, the Tapestry Planning Portal in Notion has been the gift that keeps on giving. Taking our tools and expertise from a series of organized Google folders, Sheets, and formatted documents to an online platform has been revolutionary in ways we anticipated and in ways we could have never anticipated. While our inner data/logistics/project management nerd wants to run away with this conversation, we'd like to keep it focused on the impact this tool has on our wedding planning clients. Welcome to 21st Century Wedding Planning.
USING OUR RESOURCES WISELY.
Let's face it: we spend a lot of time online. While we at Tapestry are big proponents of regulating your screen time, there is no denying the abundance of information and possibility that the internet holds. If you're perpetually curious and turned on by research (like us), then spending time online is an active part of your life and likely enriches it.
When it comes to wedding planning in the modern age, it feels practically archaic to organize a binder of spreadsheets or gather various resources on Pinterest that you may or may not end up using. That's not to say some old-school tools aren't helpful or that you cannot plan your wedding yourself. What we are saying that there is an opportunity to leverage online tools to help plan your wedding better, faster, and more efficiently than the systems of binders and spreadsheets from years gone by.
That's where our Tapestry Planning Portal comes into play. By putting the wedding planning process online, our couples are able to access information anytime, anywhere. Here’s what it allows us to do:
We don't guard the process or the path to get to a successful event. We make everything 100% transparent and accessible at all times.
We, as their planning support team, are able to interact with our couples in between meetings and move key decisions along, which allow us to focus on milestone discussions during our 1:1 time. Engaged couples are able to make progress in their own time with handy checklists and areas to interact and ask questions.
A tagging tool and notification system ensures that all parties are tuned into updates and questions and can respond to one another in a timely manner.
We harness the intelligence of the Tapestry Planning Portal together to stay in the same planning conversation for the duration of the planning relationship. Then we bundle up all the results of the process and present it in a streamlined fashion to their wedding vendor and support team.
NOTION + WEDDING PLANNING.
By using Notion's database to host our tool, we have created a wedding planning landing page with specialized areas that optimize and expedite key parts of the wedding planning process. Here are a few examples of what we mean:
Location Selection + Vendor Selection
Our tools on Notion help you compare cards of information across various venues or vendors. If you are a client, we upload cards with the information we have about your chosen or suggested vendors, such as pricing, samples of their work, shared client projects, and business ethos and values. If you are using the portal independently, we give you the format to capture and store pertinent information to revisit and discuss with your partner when making hiring decisions and investments. In just a few minutes you can look at aggregated data on your options and get a sense of which venues you want to walk through or vendors you want to talk to. Compare this method against that alternative of spending hours researching options online, deep diving websites and Instagram pages, and filling out contact forms, only to receive different bundles of information that are hard to compare across options. By creating a system in Notion that outlines the fields of information that are most helpful in comparing your hiring options, we have made the process of narrowing down your creative hires that much quicker and more enjoyable.
Guest List + MVP List + Seating Chart
The invention of the wedding website means that we now get handy CSV documents that we can use to track all kinds of information. Our Guest List tool allows you to import updated CSV outputs from your wedding website to stay up to date on your guests, as well as track key guest experience objectives like meal selection or sending a thank you card. If guests at your event are in charge of particular tasks, you can easily track and filter that information by adding it to their MVP responsibilities. And when it comes time to organize (and reorganize) tables for your reception, our drag-and-drop Seating Chart allows you to see a visual layout of tables and make changes with ease. What used to be a process of writing names on notecards and organizing them on the floor, or creating Word document lists or Excel charts, is now tables of organized information and drag-and-drop cards that ensure no one is left out when they attend your event. That confidence is priceless in the final months before your celebration.
Hired Vendor Information Page
As we build a vendor team, timeline, mood board, guest list, meal plan, and venue brief with our couples, much of that information is automatically pulled onto a landing page for vendors. Our couple's time is valuable, and we treat it as such. The ability to automatically pull information from one area of the portal to another saves a bunch of time copying, pasting, restructuring, and reformatting it. As vendors come on board, we give them access to the URL link to this page so that they can check back for updates on the celebration logistics. We love this feature in our Planning Portal because it gives full transparency to the vendor team by giving them access to the latest information and gives them the ability to get updated in their own time, rather than over a series of email exchanges. Trust us: those email exchanges add up quickly!
Photos courtesy of Between the Pine.
I guess you could say we are big fans of the Tapestry Planning Portal. The tool we built serves the goals and objectives we have learned are important as part of the wedding planning process, and it also aligns with our overall philosophy of how wedding planning fits into your life. Getting married is a major moment, worthy of a great deal of intentional planning and energy. Wedding planning should be aligned with your launch to marriage, but often becomes a burdensome interruption to your already full lives. We built this planning portal to help move the work of wedding planning away from cumbersome decision-making and into efficient and fun project management space. Amidst the intelligent tools we've created, we also have activities that help bring and keep the focus of your planning process on the core values that shape your marriage philosophy. We see this tool as a way to bring all the pieces of wedding, marriage, and life into alignment.