A School of Continuous Improvement research poster compares paper reply cards against a shared spreadsheet for wedding RSVP tracking across 214 weddings, finding no difference in late seating-chart changes between formats.
A quasi-experiment across 214 weddings finds paper and spreadsheet RSVP trackers produce the same rate of late seating-chart changes, and a national template proceeds regardless
A wedding coordinator hears the same complaint whichever format she chooses: guests change their mind after the seating chart is locked. A research poster released today from the School of Continuous Improvement tested whether the format was ever the problem.
Dr Bram Ntuli and Dr Solveig Adeyemi tracked 214 weddings over a 14-month window, comparing coordinators who kept RSVPs on paper reply cards against those using a shared spreadsheet. Late-arriving changes, logged after each seating chart locked and reconciled against the caterer’s own headcount, moved no differently by format — the spreadsheet weddings recorded a slightly higher average, not a lower one. Coordinator-reported confidence in the record was the one measure that moved, and it moved toward the spreadsheet regardless of what the log actually showed.
The instructive result here isn’t the null result — it’s how confident everyone stayed regardless. That’s the question we’re carrying into the standard’s review.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
“We thank the twelve coordinating venues that let us reconcile a log nobody else was reading,” said Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement. The team pre-registered its late-change threshold before the first venue came online, and treated coordinator confidence as a separate, secondary measure — the one where format did, unmistakably, show up.
The Office of Research Outputs’ recommendation proceeds on that confidence finding alone: a national RSVP reconciliation template, standardising the spreadsheet format across affiliated coordinators, with a published review once uptake clears half the register.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fres85.