I was on a group mentoring call with a group of American wedding officiants last week and they asked me questions about how I "get" the wedding bookings I get. It's one thing I find really hard to mentor celebrants on, but it's also the easiest to talk about. For 15 years now I've been talking about what I love. I put it out there and enough people resonate with my worldviews, my opinions, my passions, that enough of those people book me for their wedding at a price that works out to be just enough to pay our bills.
It's a good life marrying people around the world!
So that's my encouragement to you today, to keep on talking about what you love. Blog it, vlog it, podcast it, tweet it, gram it, tiktok it, talk about it at meetings, call people and tell them, find stages with microphones to take over and speak about it.
If you're wondering how I'm doing that, I'm blogging about weddings and writing my new wedding book, The Rebels' Guide To Getting Married live at https://www.rebels.guide/
In the weddings, funerals, and events industry we get all tied up with whether or not it's a quiet month, or a busy month, or if there are too many new people doing something, or too many veterans doing something else, when the truth is, we're in the VPE Industry: Very Personal Events. And at very personal events people very personally book people. They don't book brand names, or corporations or groups.
They book Mary from down the road because they love Mary.
Be like Mary, be loveable, loveable because people know you.
This is why I've always advocated for celebrants to be on all the new and cool social media platforms being themselves, because people booking weddings are normal people booking normal people. They're not brides or grooms, they're humans looking to connect with humans. So join the new Mastodon thing, or TikTok, or whatever and learn to be a human marketing themselves to other humans.
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Josh here reporting in from Mexico where we're only going to be for another six weeks, then we begin a wild 2023 travelling around the USA including Hawaii, then on to Paris and a bunch of European locales until we jet home to Australia in August. It's truly a gift to be able to live, relax, and marry people around the world.
Welcome to another monthly issue, the March 2023 edition, of the Celebrant Institute email where we bring you the latest from the Celebrant Institute blog, the professional development side of things, and what's happening in the weddings and funeral industry, or as I now call it, the Very Personal Events industry.
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This month on the blog there's an article by yours truly with my insight on creating and re-creating wedding ceremonies, or as you might know it, presenting a marriage ceremony without or with a script - link.
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Februrary was a very important month in the password industry as they celebrated International Change Your Password Day, a holiday I'm sure you and your family celebrated with glee. Here's my post on why I think changing your passwords regularly is so important for people like us, who take all the personal data of the people we're marrying - link.
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A fun one to share with your clients is the 16 ways a celebrant can end up in jail just for being a celebrant - link.
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If it had missed your inbox, remote witnessing of NOIMs in 2023 is still a thing but we'd love for it to be a proper thing - link.
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Something I didn't think would anger so many co-founders of the Celebrant Institute was this post on why I think everyone should learn Markdown - link.
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This month sometime there's apparently going to be an article in the New York Times about our article on writing a marriage ceremony with ChatGPT, but until that comes out, consider what ChatGPT and AI could add to the future and where you and your skillset lands in that new world. Here's an example RadioGPT is a frustratingly good radio station that is 100% created by artificial intelligence. As someone who used to make a living making local radio it amazes me that a computer can make locally relevant radio as good as this. You can listen in the link but while you do, wonder how your raw human skills can shine in a world where a computer is doing the heavy lifting - link.
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One of the most popular posts on the website this month just gone is an oldie but a goodie: how to increase your enquiry conversion rate - link.
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Professional development for celebrants means something different in 2023 in that the Attorney-General's department is issuing exams that they call ongoing professional development and that's yet to be issued at time of clicking send. Instead, if you hold the desire to professionally develop yourself you need to get off your behind and do it yourself. And if you are that person, then may I humbly offer a link to our professional development courses offered online.
You can access the PD whenever you like, if you have a future moment where you need to revisit it or relearn something, it's always available to you.
Last month we had an offer while Sarah was on holiday, and so many celebrants took up the offer that they helped us iron out all the little bugs in the ecommerce software we are using. So the coupon code march will drop the price by 15% because we really should be better at computers and websites than this. Sorry!
Go to https://celebrant.institute/professionaldevelopment/ to see the courses and at checkout enter the discount code march and you're off to the PD races.
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And finally, a congratulations to the 84 new celebrants who entered the great Australian tradition of holding space for people to enter in to marriage, or other life events. This email goes out to every Aussie celebrant every month plus we offer a professional membership which you can check out at https://celebrant.institute/join/ - for $10 a month you get the support that you need and you think you'll get from the government institutions you work with. Sarah and I help our members with tricky marriage law, business, and ceremony advice every day of the week. Go to https://celebrant.institute/join/ to join today.
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Our email is always open, hit reply if we can help, and if you're a member looking for priority help and advanced support go to https://celebrant.institute/ask/ now.
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Josh Withers and Sarah Aird
Founders of the Celebrant Institute
https://celebrant.institute/
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