Introduction
Hello my name is Dom and 9 years ago I met Heather & for some reason she has agreed to marry me next year.
Even better than that, she has agreed to let me organise the wedding and keep most of the details from her.
Now I'm not going to lie, I have a habit of doing things a little differently, I run a web conference twice a year and we've done things like: brought a bouncy castle into a casino and filled it with ball pool balls, hired an 18 hole crazy golf course and put it inside a hotel, opened a sweet shop without telling Heather (well actually I did tell her but she said no so I waited till she went away for the weekend).
So over the next year I'm going to be planning and organising the wedding with the help of a few friends.. and if you want, you can be involved.
When I first started doing research into what you can and can't do at a 'wedding' I got a bit dismayed.. in order for it to be considered a 'legal' ceremony you have to follow certain rules and to be honest, I'm not into those. So instead of having one wedding. We are having two..
The Friday wedding will take place somewhere in North Wales and will be a 'normal' ceremony with a few members of family there…
The Saturday wedding will be a no holds barred.. "Wedding the way I want to do it" and take place in a mystery location in Leeds with as many people as my budget will allow..
I'm going to try and film as much as possible and release them as a mini documentary, I have no film crew, no editing skills but I have 12 months, a small budget and a bride who would rather I just surprise her..
Our rewards scale from getting a weekly private video of the wedding planning and the various events leading up to the big day.
Questions for Dom
- Why is Heather letting you do this? I'm not 100% sure to be honest but I think it has something to do with the fact that although I usually don't listen to her when she says "No, don't do/buy that", I've always made sure we have fun and put on a good show. I think she trusts me enough to know that I'm not going to organise something she won't like.
- Why do I not get an invite to the wedding? Selling invites to the wedding wasn't the plan, whilst we want a lot of people at the wedding, random strangers from the internet is probably not Heathers ideal wedding guest, that's not to say we won't invite you to the wedding, just that it is not guaranteed.
- Who the hell is Dom Hodgson? Good question, I'm Dom Hodgson, I run the Think Visibility conference in Leeds, am CEO of EmberAds.com and own an online sweet shop
- Isn't this just an elaborate way of getting me to pay for your wedding…? I believe the term your looking for is 'crowd-funding'. I'd be lying if I didn't say yes, I thought it was a pretty fun way of raising some money for the wedding that would't commercialise the big day, I'll still be videoing what happens with the organising no matter what.
- Have you seen "Don't tell the Bride"? Yes, and I won't deny that this idea is based off the program but I think the program has a lot of fake drama to keep you entertained, I can assure you that this video blog will have none of that! There are some differences between this and the show; for instance Heather will be picking her own dress and I will have longer than three weeks to organise the whole thing (a lot longer than three weeks.)
- What happened at the Proposal?
Heather was invited to a private screening of her favourite film (Phantom of the Opera) at a small local cinema. Fifteen minutes into the show starting the film cut off, "our song" faded in and a video message came on screen. At the end of the video I proposed, the lights came up and Heather realised that her family (and my family) were at the back of the cinema.
We then moved into the main room into which I'd managed to sneak 60 of our friends, a bouncy castle, 15 board games, 3 consoles and a selection of high quality pick and mix.tl;dr - Proposed, she said yes
- What happens when I pay you money? The key is not to think about it as paying me money but 'supporting a worthy cause'. As soon as you pay money you'll get access to the members only area of the website where you can watch videos and read blog posts that I've written. You also get to see the tweets from the @dttbride twitter account (although I cannot say they will be thrilling)
- I don't like PayPal, can I pay by...xxx..? If you don't like PayPal then we'll integrate GoCardless very soon as an option for you, if you still don't like it then get in touch and we can see what other payment gateways we can add (or we can just do cash!)
- Why is there no limit to your campaign?
Because I'm going to be doing this over the course of a year, if in six months you tell someone about this really funny video you saw of me trying to put up scaffolding and to see that and hours of
quality video footage, they have to pay a fiver.. they should be able to
