We recently heard from a bride whose wedding will take place next summer, she was kind enough to include the engagement announcement that ran in her school alumni magazine along with her email.

The announcement got us thinking … what are the general guidelines for publicly acknowledging your engagement and where should you make those acknowledgements?

Announcing an engagement is all about timing: leave it too long and you’re old news, but beware of going public before ensuring that no family friend or relative is going to hear it third-hand from a neighbour and be hurt they weren’t included in your good news earlier.

General consensus says engagement announcements are published 3-8 months before the wedding, but a particularly long engagement, or a very short one, may dictate something outside of that timeline.

A wedding announcement, on the other hand, can run anytime from the day after the wedding to a few months later.

Putting an engagement announcement together often requires looking up individual publications’ guidelines. A photo can usually be included and and they are typically informal; while it may nicely coincide with an engagement photo shoot, there’s no need for a professional photograph. Basically, the rule of thumb for the picture is that your heads should approximately line up.

You can announce your engagement in your hometown newspaper where you still have connections, your current newspaper and in the publications of your affiliations where you think it’s appropriate and where social announcements are accepted. The Toronto Star, for example, treats engagement, and any other social notices, as a classified ad. You pay for exactly what you want and they run it, other publications will run social announcements for free, but will not guarantee their inclusion. For larger, national newspapers, the selection criteria can be fairly competitive.

A standard announcement begins with the bride’s parent’s names, their city or town, and the names of the bride- and groom-to-be as well as the approximate date of the wedding, and then the groom’s parent’s names. This is followed by a short paragraph about the couple, their occupations, their city or town and how they met, or where they went to school. With single-parent families and re-married parents, the format changes slightly but not by much, but there aren’t any hard and fast rules about it except what each publication requires you include.

Congratulations Amberlea and Jonathan!