The City of Stoke-on-Trent Council have purchased Stopford’s Ceremony Planner to allow couples to plan their wedding in the comfort of their own home.
The city, located in north Staffordshire, has a population of approximately 253,000 and registrars conduct a large number of ceremonies each year. Previously, there was mounting pressure on the registration service to find time to answer routine questions and conduct pre-ceremony meetings alongside their daily duties.
The online Ceremony Planner will help ease this pressure by allowing a couple to go through and plan every aspect of their big day without having to call the office or contact centre.
Using the online planner, couples can submit vows, readings, personal promises and music for approval from a registrar, working chronologically through a visual colour-coded list of ceremony choices. Their preparation progress is monitored through a percentage bar displayed on the ceremony dashboard and any due tasks are highlighted in orange, with overdue tasks highlighted in red.
The planner allows integrated payments, meaning celebrants can be prompted of and pay for wedding related fees online without the need for manual reminders. The planner also has the ability for registrars at Stoke-on-Trent Council to add on extra features to market to couples such as ordering extra confetti or multiple certificates.
The Ceremony Planner’s FAQ page can be updated by registrars and so will provide up-to-date information, giving celebrants a way to answer common questions about their upcoming ceremony. In the event that the celebrant has a question that isn’t answered by the FAQ, users can submit a question through the Ceremony Planner’s Ask the Registrar feature instead.
The planner will work alongside Stopford’s appointment booking system ‘agenda’, with registrars able to approve or deny ceremony submissions or answer questions at a suitable time within the system.
With discussions soon to begin on how best to customise the Ceremony Planner to fit the registration service’s requirements, Stopford looking forward to working closely with Stoke-on-Trent Council.