Real Weddings, Advice, & Inspiration

Catalyst Wedding Company highlights weddings by and for game-changers. We seek to amplify and empower voices and viewpoints that are usually missing from the Wedding Industrial Complex. We're a community of badass wedding professionals who love all things funky, fresh, diverse, unique, and personality-driven; we convene twice yearly for (un)convention, a collaborative workshop, styled shoot, and dinner party. We're also the publishers of Catalyst Wedding Mag, a resource for couples looking for inspiration and affirmation that doing things differently in wedding-world is not only ok, it's wonderful!

Proposal photo by Jennifer Claire Photography

YOU'RE ENGAGED! And after you planned that coordinated flash mob, you want your engagement announcement to be just as special. Changing your Facebook relationship status isn't exactly magical, but consider these ideas for declaring your love from the (digital) rooftop!

Make a Video Announcement

Maybe your fiancée has family members that live overseas or you recently moved to a new city; a video engagement announcement can be a way to collapse that distance and involve far-away loved ones in the excitement. Whether you hire a professional, ask a college film student, or make the video yourself, the video can be a way for you and your beloved to kick off your wedding planning with a fun, creative project. You can put the video on YouTube publicly, or just make it a private video and share the link in an email. If you have a wedding website, you can even put the video announcement on the front page.

Make it a .gif

A .gif is a series of images compiled into one file, creating an animated image. With so many generator sites available, creating a wedding announcement as a .gif file is quick and easy. For the couple who loves to take photos but might not have the time to make a video, making a .gif can be a fun and cinematic way to announce your engagement. You can use old photos that you’ve collected over the years, or have the .gif tell a particular story: how you two met or how you got engaged. The file can be easily emailed or posted on social media.

Make it a mix-tape

Send out, or post on SoundCloud, a playlist of your favorite music that leads up to an audio file of you two announcing your engagement. The music can be romantic, silly, or even a mixture of your own songs if you’re musically inclined. The best part is the playlist can allow for the wedding guests to put in their song requests for the big day. It gets everyone involved in the wedding in a new way.

CARLY SHAIA

Carly Shaia is a senior attending Longwood University for Digital Media Communication Studies and Photography from Richmond, Virginia. She focuses on telling the stories of others through her writing and photography.