I’ve been looking at the Attorney General’s Register of Celebrants quite a lot in the last few days (yes, I’m a nerd, we all know that, but it’s for another post!) and I am STAGGERED to discover how many celebrants are not utilising this utterly simple and completely free advertising platform.

All authorised celebrants in Australia are listed on the publicly-available Register of Celebrants, housed on the Attorney General’s Department’s website. A typical listing contains the celebrant’s name, the date they were registered, whether or not they’re currently active, what kind of ceremonies they’re registered to solemnise, and their contact details.This is my listing:

This is Josh’s listing:

As you can see, we both have mobile numbers and email addresses listed. But some celebrants have no contact details listed at all. None!

I can’t tell you how important that is; my very first wedding booking came through my listing on this Register, and I’ve taken no less than 12 bookings that have told me that’s where they found me in the last five years.

It’s completely free, all you have to do is keep your contact details up to date (which we’re required to do within 30 days of making any change; that’s in the legislation) and your listing will automatically appear. Of course you can choose not to list certain details; I choose not to list a street address because I don’t want people knowing where I live (and I didn’t know you could list a PO Box like Josh does; I’ll need to look into that). But some celebrants are clearly choosing not to list any of their contact details, and I think they’re making a mistake!

Yes, of course listing your details here will open you up to all sorts of marketing emails and calls from directories and other people who want to sell you stuff, but that’s just a minor inconvenience of running a business. If you want to marry people, they have to find you; if you want them to find you, you have to list your details in places.

So my advice to you today is to go check your listing at this website: https://marriage.ag.gov.au/marriagecelebrants/civil

If it’s not displaying the way you want it to, you can make changes in your Marriage Celebrant Portal (the one we go to for our registration invoice payments, not a state BDM portal). Use this platform, it’s free and easy!