Showered with Love: How to Plan an Office Baby or Bridal Shower on a Budget

You spend a lot of time with your coworkers. Because of this, it's only natural that at some point in your career, you'll be involved in pulling together a wedding or baby shower. But, if you've never done it before, you'll want to cover the following five areas:

1. Selecting a Location

Before you throw a baby shower or a bridal shower for a coworker, you need to decide whether or not the event will be held at your office or somewhere else. The benefit of holding it at the office is that it can be done during lunchtime or immediately after work in a conference or lunch room. Also, it will cost you nothing to use this space and it's convenient for all to attend. However, this often means that, depending on the size of your employee population, you may need to invite all employees to the event. Otherwise, you risk offending someone.

Holding a shower offsite, on the other hand, means you need to find an available venue. Depending on timing, your least-expensive option may be to hold it at a coworker's home. However, depending on the size of your guest list and your food options, you might choose to throw a luncheon at a local restaurant.

Naturally, having the event offsite always brings up the question of when you will hold the shower. To accommodate most schedules, you could plan it for a weekend, after work or during a lunch break.

2. Creating a Guest List

This is probably one of the toughest parts of party-planning. Who should you invite? The guest list will likely depend on your company size and population. If it's a small office, you'll need to invite everyone. However, if it's a larger company, you may be able to invite only the employees in your department.

Keep in mind who the intended would want to invite. This just might include work associates she socializes with in other departments. In addition, regardless of the size of your workplace, if there are men involved, you'll need to decide if they get an invitation, too.

Be sure that when you finalize your guest list and are ready to invite people, you do so using traditional invitations. Using the company e-mail system for a personal event is likely to be contrary to company policy.

3. Selecting a Gift

Choosing a shower gift should not cause a headache. Therefore, to help guests select the perfect gift, be sure to provide registry information - baby or bridal - along with the shower invitation.

Because not everyone may be able to afford a gift or feel they know the bride or mother-to-be as well as others in the office, consider selecting a group gift. This will allow people to contribute a small amount, usually $5 to $10 each. Then, allow those who are organizing the event to use that money to purchase a single large item or a group of smaller gifts.

4. Choosing the Right Food and Decorations

There are three options for food and beverages: have it catered, take the bride or mother-to-be out to a restaurant, or have a potluck.

One of the easiest ways to provide food and beverages is to cater the event by collecting a contribution from each guest. This way, no one has to worry about cooking the night before or where they will store the food before the shower.

If you really want to keep costs to a minimum, you could serve appetizers only. And, if the group is small enough, you might want to take the bride or mother-to-be out to lunch. That way, everyone pays for their own meal and contributes to that of the intended. Keep in mind cost, and select an appropriate restaurant accordingly.

As for decorations, what you use will depend on where you have the event and your budget. However, if you celebrate in the office, you can keep it to a minimum - for instance, a banner or sign, centerpiece (i.e., bouquet of handpicked flowers) and a specially decorated chair for the guest of honor. These can all be homemade.

5. Planning the Activities

Whether or not you decide to play games will depend on the amount of time you have. Regardless, there are quick and easy games and activities you can play. For instance, for a baby shower, you could play the "Baby Name Game," in which guests go around the room and use the alphabet to suggest a baby name. If you can't think of a name, you're out. The final person to provide a name wins a small prize.

For a bridal shower, you could play a wedding version of MadLibs. Create a story about married life, leaving some of the words blank. Then, ask guests to provide the parts of speech - nouns, verbs, adjectives - and read the story with the replaced words.

The whole idea is that there is a lot you can do with a little to make any office baby or bridal shower special. It's just a matter of planning it out.