If you’re planning to use Patchwork to ask for money towards your honeymoon, check out our top tips before you get started:
Keep it simple
Although honeymoon funds are increasingly popular, not all of your guests will be familiar with the concept and some may be expecting a traditional gift list. So when welcoming people to your page make sure you’re clear about what you’d like people to contribute towards and why. Including ‘Honeymoon fund’ in your title always helps. Then you can use your description to share your plans and add a simple set of instructions (so even your 90 year old Nan will know what to do). Something like:
“Having lived together for 5 years we’ve already got a toaster and all the crockery we’ll ever need. So instead of traditional gifts we’d really appreciate a contribution towards an amazing honeymoon that we’ll treasure forever. Just click around our patchwork to choose which experience you’d like to treat us to. With love and thanks.”
Make it personal
Your friends and family know and love you and will want to hear about your plans for your first adventure as a married couple. So don’t be afraid to make your honeymoon registry personal. Use your images and words to share not just what you want but also something about you both as a couple.
This doesn’t have to mean creating a patchwork from scratch. If you know where you are going on honeymoon you can customise one of our readymade patchworks of your chosen destination. Or use our ‘Beautiful Island of Somewhere’ patchwork if you haven’t decided yet. Then simply tweak a few words to personalise it and add or delete patches to suit your likes and dislikes.
You can also add a banner image of you both, a profile photo or even include photos of you within your patchwork. So there are lots of opportunities for your friends to see your happy faces, remember how much they love you, and then give generously!
Spread the cost
The best way to raise the most money for your honeymoon fund is to make it possible for everyone to contribute something – no matter how little. If the cost of all your honeymoon experiences are £50 upwards, you’re in danger of excluding people who will then give you nothing. So it makes sense to offer a range of prices across your patchwork – from £1 for a bottle of beer to £500 for a night in a hotel. This way the people who can afford to can add multiple gifts to their cart – to a maximum spend of £1300 per transaction. And those on a budget can still treat to you a meaningful experience for a fiver and leave a message along with their gift.
Remember people are attracted to beautiful things
They just are. And whilst beauty is in the eye of the beholder, no-one likes a pixelated image. We’ve got a gorgeous image gallery, so whether you’re customising one of our honeymoon templates or creating your patchwork from scratch we’ve got lots of high quality photos for you to use. But if you want to use your own images check they don’t pixelate when you add them to your patchwork. It might sound weird, but people will choose to click on quality images (and give more generously) if it looks like you’ve made an effort to make your patchwork appeal to them.
Enjoy playing around
You can customise and publish a readymade honeymoon patchwork in less than 5 minutes by adding a title and linking it to your PayPal account. But if you’ve got half an hour with a cup or tea or a glass of wine it can be fun to play around. Whether you’re creating a patchwork from scratch or using a readymade template it’s easy to crop, rotate and replace images within your patches, add new patches or delete ones you don’t want. And if you’re a Pinterest addict you’ll love the ability to resize patches and move them around your page until you’re happy with your layout. Just drag and drop them wherever you like and use the pink corners to resize and reshape.
Don’t limit the choice of gifts for your guests
You can set a quantity for each item or experience within a patch. So if you want two return flights, seven nights in a hotel and one tandem skydive you can set these quantities once you’ve set your prices. Just click to answer the question ‘How many do you want?’ and enter the number. Then, once this number of items or experiences have been bought, the patches will say ‘Sold out’.
This makes sense for one-off items or experiences, so that the people who choose to give these gifts know that they have paid for a particular trip or treat. But overall we recommend you leave most patch items ‘unlimited’. Particularly things you plan to have a lot of – like meals, ice-creams, cocktails or glasses of wine! If someone buys you 100 beers it doesn’t mean you have to drink them all – you can just use the excess money towards something more wholesome like a massage. And if six people chose to fund a single boat trip that’s also okay. When you’re on the boat you can take a photo and upload it to your Patchwork account. Then just choose to ‘Thank by patch’ to send the photo along with a message to all of the individuals who contributed to the trip.
Leaving the majority of your patch items ‘unlimited’ enables you to collect the maximum funds and also ensures latecomers don’t try to buy you a gift on the morning of your wedding to find that all the options have ‘sold out’.
Don’t forget to say thank you
You can prepare an automatic thank you before you publish your patchwork so that your friends and family can see your message (and a photo if you’d like to add one) as soon as they’ve contributed. This is this easiest way to immediately show appreciation of your guest’s gifts. But with details of contributors’ names and emails (postal addresses are optional) in your account, along with a record of what they bought, how much they spent and the message they left, it’s easy to thank friends properly on return from your honeymoon, with photos of you enjoying your experience.
You can thank friends via your Patchwork account (individually, by patch or as a group) with an image and a message in an email. And if you’d like to post thank you cards you can download a CSV spreadsheet of everyone’s details from your account, then send thank you cards using our 30% discount with Patchwork print partner MOO.
Ready to start your patchwork? Browse our customisable honeymoon fund templates here.