Need to Rate Everything? Rate Your Church!
Let’s go church shopping!
People are obsessed with rating products and services online. If you can never get enough and want to extend your ratings to churches, I found an article on ReadWriteWeb about a new site called ChurchRater.com that is dedicated to rating and reviewing churches. When I saw the site I immediately thought: landmine. Many people take religion very seriously because it is a defining part of their lives. And after looking through the site a bit, I could see that some people did feel quite strongly about certain churches and about the mission of the site itself. So, I wondered whose idea the site was.
Well, the site features two Founders on its front page: Jim Henderson and Matt Casper, a Protestant minister and an atheist, respectively. In 2007, they cowrote, “Jim & Casper Go To Church” in which they visited and evaluated various churches, much as this site is meant to help others to do. Also listed on the site is Tyler Mahoney (Director of Communications & Co-Founder). A quick search online turned up a LinkedIn page, which stated that the company had 4 employees. It also turned up one additional employee: Julian Zegelman (Co-Founder & Investor).
Looking at the site I have a few comments to make. First, it needs some graphic design work. For a site put together by a group of people that includes an investor, the design is subpar. I have to think that a redesign is in the works. If it isn’t, it should be. Also, only 380 churches are listed so far and it seems like most don’t have many reviews, yet. Plus, the functionality of the site is very basic. The most finely you can filter the church listings is by a specific denomination in a given state.
There are a few features I’d like to see. The ability to see all churches within a certain distance from an address or zip code would be helpful. So would the ability to see the church locations on a map. Another helpful feature would be the ability to see the ratings of churches without drilling into each of them and the ability to sort church results based on ratings.
Given the state of the website I can only come to one of two conclusions:
- The purpose of the site is to drum up publicity for the church review service, which they are offering to churches for $250-$2950 dollars and to sell more copies of their book.
- The site doesn’t have enough funding yet to afford a graphic designer or enough developers to build additional functionality, so they are hoping that the publicity will turn into investor dollars to improve the site.
Any way you slice it, ChurchRater.com should have hired a graphic designer before throwing this site out to the media. It’s an interesting idea, but it looks unprofessionally done, which doesn’t inspire confidence in potential investors or customers. I am interested enough in what they’re building to check back in six months to see where they’re at, but I don’t expect the site to catch on fire. It has potential to serve a small niche, but I don’t see broad based appeal. Especially, since while they hype this as Yelp for churches, it has much less functionality than Yelp. Plus, Yelp already has ratings and reviews for many more churches than ChurchRater.com does. What will convince consumers that they should search on this site when they can continue searching on Yelp, both on the web or using a mobile application on their phones? Personally, I don’t see a compelling reason to do so at this time.
February 22, 2010 - 10:01 pm
“it looks unprofessionally done, which doesn’t inspire confidence in potential investors or customers. I am interested enough in what they’re building to check back in six months to see where they’re at, but I don’t expect the site to catch on fire.”
I agree with many of your observations. But we decided to launch when we felt it was “good enough to criticize”. Which is what you are offering.
Even you admit you might be back in 6 months. Yelp isint focused in churches we are, No other site puts “church and rater” in the same sentence- it is too provocative. We do – which is why we got to your eyeballs.
True we have lots to prove but at least we’ve got a problem many sites would love to have a shot at solving.
Thanks for noticing us – every little bit helps
February 22, 2010 - 10:24 pm
You’re addressing an interesting issue. I hope the publicity you get gains you enough eyeballs to establish yourself while you work out the kinks. Good luck!