Welcome to the silly season edition of the Celebrant Institute mailout read by you and 10,134 of your colleagues in celebrancy around Australia and the world. Happy, December 1st!
I started writing this at home in Tasmania's Huon Valley serenaded by my children, and finished writing it in Queensland's Fortitude Valley being serenaded by local singer Kimberley Bowden at the Osbourne Hotel. There's never a boring day in celebrancy is there.
I'm in Brisbane for a wedding earlier today where the couple with an 18-year age gap specifically asked to be roasted in their wedding ceremony and I've got to be honest, it felt pretty good to deliver a solid roasting in my opening.
✈️ This is my last trip for the year. 185,000km travelled for weddings, 95 flights, and notably: 30 hours lost in flight delays. The destination wedding game is nowhere near as attractive as it seems!
☀️ I'll be spending my summer relaxing at home in Tasmania with my family, turning another year older in a week, and sporadically finding time in front of the computer to make sure my 2025 is a better year in business than 2024, which leads me to the two webinars I delivered this past month.
🎄 Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. Sarah and I are grateful for your membership, your email subscription, podcast listen, social media follow, and your replies to every email we send on the first day of each month.
– Josh Withers
P.S. Here's a link to the Christmas song referenced in the title.
🤖 Artificial Intelligence Webinars
I delivered two webinars this past month for celebrants wanting to dip their toes/feet into the AI water. The first was on increasing your productivity as a celebrant using AI tools available today and the second was on GEO - aka generative engine optimisation - which is simply a modern take of SEO, but taking into account that people are searching for celebrants on ChatGPT now.
You can rewatch both of those webinars and get the notes right now.
The second webinar is the fruit of my last month's research in redeveloping my website for speed and search optimisation. I'm pretty proud of my new celebrancy website's speed and within 24 hours it had already started ranking better on search on less popular keywords. Turns out if you just do what they say your website starts ranking better.
If you're keen on getting a better website it's the key to getting found by more couples. Reach out to your favourite web nerd and tell them you need a website optimised for GEO, and if they don't know what you're talking about get in touch and I can help you get what you need.
📧 Your spam folder
A few celebrants have reported that emails from the AGD end up in their spam folder. There's three things you can do to make sure important and good emails don't end up in your spam folder.
- Check your spam/junk mail folder. Click on it daily and see if there's anything good in there. Delete the bad emails, and for the good emails, see step 2.
- If you find not-spam email in your spam folder tell your email software/website it is not junk. There will be a "not junk" or "not spam" button - click that baby!
- Whitelist important email addresses. Here's a HubSpot article on how to do this, on all the popular platforms. I can think of two to start with: marriagecelebrantssection@ag.gov.au for emails from our friends in Canberra and hello@celebrant.institute so you always get this email!
🎓 OPD
Do your OPD. Seriously. More than 40% of the people reading this email have not done their OPD yet!
Here's the link: marriage.ag.gov.au/mcportal.
🍎 You should sign up for Apple Business Connect
People with Apple devices are traditionally higher spenders and better customers and now there's a way for your business to be better found by those people. By registering for Apple Business Connect.
🍷 SA BDM is messing with NOIMs
Our oracle, Sarah, has a report on what the heck South Australia's BDM is doing to NOIMs.
🔐 Hackers are coming for data ... and celebrants have really good data
Every morning when I open my email and read the daily news emails I'm waiting to see a celebrant in there for a data leak. Of course, we all saw a celebrant in the news recently for far more interesting reasons, but my fear of a celebrant getting hacked and all their couples' paperwork being stolen is real.
So there are three things you and I can do to ensure our clients' data is as secure as possible:
- Erode: Have as little data as possible in the first place. We cover this in the most recent episode of the Celebrant Talk Show.
- Encrypt: The data you do need to receive, store it in an encrypted data folder on your computer. I've written a tutorial on how to do this on the Celebrant Institute website.
- Expire: Send NOIMs and other marriage paperwork not in an email, but via an expiring link. I'll write a tutorial about this soon, but in this email I'm debuting - at the bottom for the real readers - a free service available to all celebrants called Enclosed. When you need to send a marriage document to a couple visit https://enclosed.celebrant.institute and upload the document there. As you upload it your computer - not our servers - encrypts the file so Sarah and I can't even view it. Then you can choose when that link will expire, in one hour, one day, one week or one month, choose Create Note, and you get a link to send to couples. So if perhaps your - or their - email gets hacked that link won't work and the file won't even exist. We're trialling this with people that read all the way to the bottom of the emails, feel free to use this and offer feedback. We get zero insight into how the service is used or who uses it. The only thing we find out is how popular it is by proxy of how much it costs us each month to run - and hopefully that is analogous to how many people are members - join for $12 a month now if you're not a member already.
🥰 On membership
I'm in a few celebrant Facebook groups and it always amuses me how many celebrants embarrassingly submit themselves to the feedback of strangers in Facebook groups when they have legal questions or questions about ceremony.
Even today a celebrant is commenting on my Facebook page about legal questions, and it's all ok, but the reason I laugh is because members of the Celebrant Institute get the opportunity to ask silly, interesting, weird, stupid, wonderful, amazing questions about celebrancy privately to myself and Sarah every day and not have their Facebook notifications fill up with replies that aren't correct.
We don't tell anyone and your dignity stays intact!
If you want Sarah and I in your corner every day, join now at members.celebrant.institute which is also the same place existing members can manage their memberships and also cancel.
And once you are a member, go to celebrant.institute/ask and ask all of your questions, all the time.
We're here to help and we're glad you're here!
You are enjoying another Celebrant Institute production and you're receiving this email because you're a celebrant. If you aren't a celebrant then I don't know how you ended up here. If you've been forwarded this update and you'd like to subscribe for free, you can do that here.