Many DJs are now offering all day hosting services to wedding couples, satisfying the demand for a less formal option to traditional toastmasters. Toby Oakley discusses what’s involved and explains why this route may not be the right choice for all DJs.

I doubt that anyone has noticed, but I haven’t written anything for Pro Mobile magazine for over a year. I find writing these articles very fun and I only stopped because I ran out of topics! Rather than rehashing my own stories, repeating other contributors’ content or talking about subjects I know little about, I decided to bow out for a while. But now I’m back with a short introduction to the emerging sub-industry of the all-day wedding host.

Essentially, all-day wedding hosts combine the services of a DJ with those of a Master of Ceremonies to provide wedding couples with one spokesperson to co-ordinate and present their big day, right from the ceremony through to the end of the dancing. Most DJs who have become hosts pitch their style as less formal than a traditional toastmaster, which also gives them a unique angle that is attractive to many modern couples.

So what started off this trend of UK DJs becoming hosts? I guess you could pinpoint it to the emergence, over the last decade, of training workshops and ‘DJ classes’ teaching DJs how to host. These seemed to polarise opinion within DJ circles, with some swearing by them and others derogatively referring to them as ‘American’. The view of many was that the idea of DJs taking on the role of a host was both an ‘American idea’ and also one that would ‘only work in America’. Personally, I don’t share this view. I have never really regarded what I do as anything ‘American’. After all, chivalry and etiquette were an important part of medieval European court life long before America was ‘discovered’. In fact the first documented reference to a toastmaster wearing a red coat is Mr. William Knight-Smith of London in 1895 and the first toastmaster’s guild was created in the UK in 1953, which still stands as the Society of London Toastmasters, so it is a very British tradition. It just so happens that it was the Americans who pioneered the concept of mobile DJs offering informal hosting services.

Five years ago, after attending Derek Pengelly’s first workshop, I jumped on the bandwagon and organised a wedding management workshop with a UK toastmaster called Brian Wroe. It attracted around 35 DJs from across the UK and, over a period of three days, we learnt about the duties of a UK Master of Ceremonies. It was basically ‘wedding management for dummies’. I personally found it very rewarding, as did the other DJs who attended. Many of them have since attended Toastmaster International meetings, DJ workshops, storytelling courses and stand-up comedy classes, not to mention our very own Pro Mobile Conference! I have watched them all go on to become wedding powerhouses, adding huge personalisation and attention to detail to events that are very often seen as ‘just another wedding’ to the venue managers.

Wedding hosting is definitely a skill that can be learnt, but it is a vocation that certainly won’t suit all DJs. Many of the skills needed to be a great wedding host don’t overlap with those needed to be a fantastic evening function DJ. A good wedding host must be meticulous and great at planning. They also need to be able to keep calm in stressful situations and have exceptional people skills.

It goes without saying that wedding hosts need to be impeccably presented and have excellent MC skills on the mic. However, I’d say that ‘off the mic’ organisational skills are just as important – if not more so. At the moment I’d say that a very small percentage of the DJs in the UK are doing all-day wedding management properly, but this number is definitely on the increase in a big way. When I say ‘properly’, I mean to the standard of a good venue manager (which we all know are few and far between!) or a professional wedding planner. When I first became a wedding host in 2010 I was lucky enough to work alongside a very experienced venue-wedding coordinator who taught me a lot about wedding etiquette and planning.

Lots of planning goes into most weddings these days. Brides, especially, put a lot of thought into every detail, which means that they are understandably upset when these plans aren’t executed as they intended. A good wedding host needs to fully understand every detail of a couple’s plans for their day, keep track of them as they unfold and, as much as possible, make sure that everything happens as planned. Of course unforeseen circumstances are bound to crop up, so wedding hosts also need to be able to keep their cool, act on their feet and keep everyone informed if anything does need to change.

When I first started to advertise my hosting service, I was often met with clients and venues saying, “but the DJ just arrives in the evening”, which was very frustrating. It’s only been five years, but things are very different now. I often have hotels ringing me up specifically asking me to host weddings during the day when their usual toastmaster is not available. I even had the general manager of a local venue ask me to run three weddings last week (in place of the catering manager) as they were short staffed, but unfortunately I was already busy. This is fantastic, as I never expected things to move forward so quickly, but more importantly it’s so lovely that they trust me to do a good job!