Being Responsive

Well ladies (and gents!), I think it's time for a good ol' RSVP breakdown. We surprisingly did not have to chase down too many RSVPs, but we did have some last minute changes. And now with just a few days left til the wedding, I'm calling it. Without further ado... Here's the Coyote RSVP breakdown:

We invited 205 guests and the breakdown looked a little something like this:

Yes you read that right. Almost 80% of our invited guests are either directly related to me or close family friends. Yikes. (I have a really big family you guys.) Once the RSVPs starting rolling in we noticed that we were getting a lot of declines, but we didn't really add up the numbers until I had stalked all of my guests and left threatening messages their answering machine everyone had responded.

So who's coming to the wedding?

This makes our final head count 124 (or 126 if you include Mr. Coyote and me). I realized that we had a high decline rate, but didn't quite realize how high until I looked at this:

Although it was kind of shocking to see a 40% decline rate, Mr. Coyote and I are actually really happy about our final number. After we sent out the invitations we both started to think about how overwhelmed we would be with such a large number of guests. (If we went with the standard 20% decline rate we would have around 165 guests.) To us, 124 seems like a much more manageable number and I think it will allow us to really spend time with all of our guests.

There are two things I learned from this little exercise. This first is that our friends are either really excited for our wedding or just can't say no to a good party. (I'm leaning toward the latter.) 

And the second thing is that you should never expect 20% of your guests to decline. I've witnessed weddings with a 50% decline rate and I've witnessed weddings with a 5% decline rate. Sure, it's fun to guess and play around with how many people *might* show up, but at the end of the day, only you know your guests!

What did your accept/decline rate look like? Did you learn anything from your responses?