Wedding Celebrant Training – All You Need to Know

Everything you need to know about the Match and Dispatch Wedding Celebrant Course

Welcome to the Match and Dispatch Wedding Celebrant Training blog… we guess you’re here as you’re thinking about a career change. We’re hoping this blog will give you the insight you need into this amazing, challenging, fulfilling and, fabulous role, to make a decision whether it’s right for you or not.

What is Wedding Celebrant Training?

Well, we suspect you’ve all been to a wedding at some time in your life… it may have been in a register office or a posh hotel, a beautiful barn or back garden. Whatever type of wedding it was, there will have, most likely, been someone presiding over proceedings and, if that was a registrar you may have thought, ‘OK, that was lovely, but not all that personal…; if it was a celebrant hopefully you thought – ‘Wow, they’re really amazing, I would love to do that!’ or possibly, ‘Wow, they were pretty good but… I could do so much better!’. And maybe a little seed was sown.

If you were lucky enough to see a really great celebrant doing their thing, we would imagine they made it look easy. Totally in control of their surroundings, stage-managing the event, speaking clearly and confidently, with a well-written, totally bespoke script. Taking ownership, making everyone feel at ease and safe in their hands whilst also guiding them through a well-written, meaningful, joyful, funny and sincere service.

What you haven’t seen is what goes on in the background – the researching, the writing, the constant updating of knowledge and skills and, also, the self-employed aspect of this job – the marketing, the promoting, the business building and effort required to get those bookings … which is where we come in…

We will teach you the role of the celebrant, how to work alongside the registration service as well as entirely independently, how to support your clients to have the service that is absolutely right for them and how to create amazing, meaningful and memorable ceremonies. Not only that but we will look at the business side of your career – how to market and grow and organise yourself as a self-employed person and create a sustainable and successful business.

We encourage you to think long and hard about becoming a wedding celebrant – the weight of responsibility (it’s the biggest day of this couple’s life), the commitment needed (you’re going to be working most weekends in the summer season) and the breadth of the role (you’re self-employed so marketing, admin, sales and making the tea is all in your job description). But also consider the difference you can make, the support and confidence you can bring, and reward of making a really wonderful day just that bit more special.

If being a wedding celebrant is something you really really are called to… we’d love to help you realise your dream.

Who are we?

We are Kate T and Kate D and together we have over thirty years of conducting ceremonies under our belts. We have always endeavoured to be exemplary in everything we do as www.kateandkatecelebrants.co.uk we have built our own successful celebrant business and, not only that, we created www.coffinclub.co.uk on the funeral side of things as we wanted everyone to be aware of all the choices available to them for their last hurrah!

We offer both funeral celebrant training from scratch and continued professional development for funeral celebrants in the form of our award-winning Celebrant-plus course. We have quite a trophy cabinet of awards and are very well known and regarded in the celebrant world, partly because our training is outstanding but also because as an organisation we really champion celebrants and do our best to raise standards across our whole profession.

Speaking of standards….

What Qualifications are Required to be A Wedding Celebrant? (*we are talking about non-legal ceremonies)

Well, the short answer is … none!!*

In most of the UK we let the Registration Service take care of the legal bits and then the wedding celebration ceremony can be as creative and magnificent as you can make it. Therefore, as there is no legal aspect to it, you don’t actually need to have any official qualification to lead this type of ceremony. That said, we wouldn’t recommend you embark on a celebrant career (weddings or funerals) without undertaking some proper training. There are loads of training organisations out there now – many of which offer absolutely excellent courses – but we recommend you do your research before jumping on as some are better than others.

What Does Our Course Include?

Seven information packed modules:

The course is provided virtually – Seven video modules with accompanying workbook. However, in addition to that you also get two videos of real weddings being conducted by Kate T, two videos of couples meeting and a video of a ROV couples meeting. There is also a section presented by Glenda Proctor – handfasting queen – if you’re more interested in the ritualistic side of things. You also get a whole separate booklet of sample scripts. So there’s a lot of content in there.

There are monthly tutorials – via Zoom – to keep you supported throughout and we have a closed FB group for all our students/graduates where you can post any thoughts.

The course covers everything from the legal bits, to couples meetings, script writing, presentation and stage managing; along with our usual focus on marketing – one of the modules is entirely devoted to Wedding Fayres.

As with our other courses we have worked our noonies off to give you everything we know and more!

Participants will:

Understand what a celebrant is and why it’s such a great job!
Understand how wedding celebrants and registrars co-exist / interact
Understand why a couple might choose to have a celebrant-led ceremony
Understand the purpose of a couples meeting
See a demonstration of a couples meeting
Make notes based on couples meeting in order to write a wedding script
Understand the journey of a wedding script and why it works
Understand the elements of a wedding script: ie the Welcome/Opening, couple story, vows, signing, closing words, announcement
Be introduced to additional content – conventional to crazy and everything in-between
Be introduced to rituals/symbolism – featuring the Queen of Hand-fasting – Glenda Proctor
Practise writing wedding scripts
Understand ceremony preparation, ceremony location setting and stage-managing.
Look at the Five Ps of Public Speaking
Get an amazing Wedding fayres road map
Be introduced to self-employment – admin, marketing etc

Give it a go – you’ll pull everything together to write and conduct your first wedding!

On completion you get a lovely certificate, use of our logo on all your marketing materials, website and social media, and a listing on our celebrant directory.

How Does It Work?

The Match and Dispatch Wedding Celebrant Training Course consists of seven video modules, with comprehensive accompanying handbooks and sample scripts. You have no time limit on starting or finishing and you have the videos for life, so you can refer back to them whenever you like.

The supporting handbook, is, we’re told, a really brilliantly supportive resource and, added to the videos and handbook there are monthly live-via-Zoom tutorials that you can jump on as often as you like – there’s no limit to how many times you attend – so if you need a bit of human-being support, we’re there for you. Additionally, you get immediate access to our closed FB group – another place you can get support from us and also from your peers – it’s a really lovely space with lots of like-minded guys and gals all rooting for each other. The video modules are on a private YouTube channel so you don’t need to download anything – you just click on the link to play. The modules range from 45 mins to 1.5 hours so it’s around seven hours-ish, plus, obviously, reading time, and time to complete exercises and assignments.

Some people binge watch and yomp their way through… others are slow and steady – either way is fine! There are interactive exercises along with assignments that you need to submit for feedback and, our trainees tell us, you feel robustly supported every single step of the way.

Why have we gone for online training over residential?

Well, we used to provide our training live in situ… but, it was restrictive for lots of attendees as it required them to be available at a certain time and in a certain place. By taking the
course online, we’ve made it accessible to everyone whatever their time availability or geographic location. We have been able to create additional expert resources as, rather
than having to ask other funeral experts to keep turning up, we’ve been able to produce video content that can be viewed again and again without them being there.

We feel we give you the best of both worlds as, whilst you may not be physically training with other people, we offer you a really supportive virtual community through our Facebook group and face-to-face tutorial with Kate and Kate.

We have also managed to keep the price of our course competitive as online training is more cost-effective for us than a residential course and more cost-effective for you as you don’t have any travel or accommodation costs.

Some of our students have told us that they weren’t huge fans of online training until they took our courses!

What’s My Earning Potential ?

OK, now’s the time we get real with you. We look at other training organisation’s websites and we see, in this bit of their spiel, they bandy about figures from £30,000 per year (potentially achievable) to £100k+ (absolute fiction). We’re going to start by saying that this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Like setting up any business you’re aren’t going to hit the ground running income-wise, you will need to consistently market yourself, grow your community and your reputation and build over time – engagement is at the heart of what you do. As a rule of thumb, most new businesses don’t become profitable until year three.

You will have times when you think you’re never going to get enough weddings to make a living and then you will have times when, like buses, they all come at once. And, over time, you will grow to a level of work that suits you and suits the way you work. We’re not going to make any false promises about vast wealth and early retirement! We’re going to be honest and say that what you put in you’ll get out and that we really believe that, through our training, you will have the best chance of building a sustainable business that has a solid enough foundation to grow from and a realistic set of goals and expectations.

The most important things to remember about your earning potential…

There is only one of you… you can’t scale yourself up. There are only so many Saturdays in a year (and if we subtract the winter months, even fewer). So, you need to be realistic about how many weddings you are likely to be able to conduct per year. We would say a realistic maximum is around 30. You will get some weekday weddings and a few at either end of the summer season but the majority will be on summer Saturdays so you need to consider how you split your fees to make your income work for you year round.

Are you prepared to travel? Kate and Kate Celebrants like to stay within an hour and a half of our home base but some celebrants are happy to go wherever the wedding is – if that’s the case make sure you factor in travel/time and accommodation in to your fee.

Most wedding celebrants charge between £600 at the lower fee end to £1500 at the upper end. We will talk to you on the course about setting your fees and what your realistic goals might be. We encourage you to value yourself both in terms of the job you do and financially and we support you to find the level of fee and the amount of work that works for you. No false promises of wealth beyond your wildest dreams – just honest expectations.

Certification

We have had our courses CPD Accredited by the CPD Certification Service because we felt it was important that we held ourselves up to external scrutiny and had our courses rigorously assessed to ensure they really are as good as we think they are! Some other trainers offer the National Open College Network (NOCN) qualification – which provides an additional level of external accreditation. We have chosen not to offer this for now as it’s more expense for you and, having done thorough research into it, we can’t see how it really adds any benefit to you. We have yet to come across a celebrant who has
been asked to show this qualification.

Need to Know More ?

Join us for our weekly Discovery Webinar – every Monday at 6pm via Zoom – BOOK HERE

If you can’t make Mondays please drop us a line and we’ll see if we can fit you in another time.

You can also sign up for our newsletter using the form just below this post.

We’re looking forward to welcoming you!

Kate Tym and Kate Dyer, founders of Match and Dispatch, are celebrants in their own rights and the founders of Coffin Club UK, they are multi-award-winning and are known as the voice of celebrants as they have made it their mission to champion celebrants across the UK and globally.