The UK Alliance of Wedding Planners - promoting professionalism in wedding planning

Following our recent annual Wedding Planning Excellence seminar we asked delegates for their honest feedback in order that, going forward, we can put together events which specifically meet planners’ needs.

Key findings were as follows:

• the location was beautiful, central and offered good facilities
• speakers were excellent, networking opportunities were great and many felt inspired and, as one planner put it ‘reignited’ by the weekend
• most felt the cost was money well spent, however a more modular event, allowing one to choose which sessions to attend, might make it accessible to more planners - London would be the most obvious location in which to achieve this
• suggestions of topics to cover another year included more marketing and PR, more social networking, search engine optimisation, legal issues, entertainment other than musicians

This is such useful information, so thank you very much to delegates for providing this.

Below, see us enjoying a few favours ourselves for a change.

We were very keen this year to make the programme for our Seminar fresh and cover new areas and topics of interest. However we did invite back three of our speakers from WPE 09, one of whom was Ray Hutchin of www.actioncoach.com .

Ray did two superb sessions for us, covering what he described as The Nine Steps To Success, plus how to work with different personality types. Indeed, there were a few giggles as Ray correctly interpreted the different personalities of the UKAWP Directors. Now I understand better why three such different people work so neatly together.

We undertook a practical exercise in teams and took away planning tools and a real idea of how to identify personality types and thus learn to work well with clients and colleagues of all types.

Thank you Ray for your inspiration and insight.

Two weeks ago we held our long anticipated second Wedding Planning Excellence Seminar. Over the next weeks we thought we would give you some details about the weekend at the beautiful www.fawsleyhall.com in Northamptonshire.

We will look at the key messages we all took away, feedback from our delegates and we will ask some of our speakers to give their overall impression of the event. I am sure you will see some familiar faces and note that, aside from a lot of learning, it was a great opportunity to network and indeed much fun was had by all.