www.terumah.net (Religion)

rickytherhino

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Hello all!


I wanted you to take a look and review my new site. I would consider this a beta version but please do not hesitate to provide positive and negative feedback.


Regards,
Daniel


www.terumah.net
 

essellar

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Slick, but there are two things that sort of bug me.

The first is that it's difficult to tell, from the landing page, what the site/app is all about. It's covered in the FAQ, but my experience with end-users is that the FAQ is the "nuclear option", and too few are willing to exercise it. It might seem obvious to somebody in the more conservative Jewish community (although laws around Shabbat and minyanim would make your trigger episode an unfamiliar and unlikely thing) and to a few US-based Christian communities that have incorporated a lot of Biblical Hebrew terminology into their lexicon, but it's opaque to the outsider. I'd take a cue from Tikkun (the magazine, which is worth reading for brain food even if you disagree with every word in it), which has a definition of the word on the cover of every issue -- you may not understand Hebrew, but you get the gist of what the magazine is all about in a very few words.

The second thing is the transaction skim. You're right, in that 1% isn't a whole lot (and many orgs take an awful lot more -- sometimes more than half -- for "administration"). But if you do get traction, 1% of a whole lot can be a huge pile of money in absolute terms. I don't think that anybody is going to complain about the actual cost of keeping the service up (and as it grows, you'd need to get into some pretty hefty service tiers). Nor will any but a few unreasonable people expect anyone to do something like this on a purely voluntary basis (and those people will likely never have tried to keep anything more complex than a bake sale afloat). But if the site looks big (people are lousy estimators in general, and make a lot of unfounded assumptions), then people are going to start thinking that you're raking it in. Let's face it: there are a few poster boys and girls out there who've sort of lost the "sell your second cloak" message along the way. Some sort of "what happens if I accidentally win the lottery here" statement in the FAQ might be in order.
 

rickytherhino

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Thanks for taking a look. You have very valid points and I will make sure to address them. I definitely don't want to get in the business of ripping people/churches/synagogues etc. off. That wouldn't be good for business.

Daniel
 

essellar

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I trust your motives -- but a lot of people accuse me of being insufficiently cynical. You'd need a whole lot of people doing essentially all of their tithing and donations through the site/app before you'd be doing much more than paying for the cost of the service and maybe getting something approaching fair recompense for your time. The problem is that people are largely innumerate and don't think things through -- if they see, say, 1500 houses of worship listed (and in some counties you could cover nearly that many with a large blanket), assume an average congregation size of, say, 50-100 households, and multiply that by what they think they ought to be giving (if there weren't so many things in the way, of course), and then make the mistake of assuming that all, or at least a large fraction, of that is going through you (and that's wrong on so many levels -- the reason they see so many people in church is because those people are going to church, and are probably handing over an envelope there), then they come up with a "1%" that has little to do with reality.

As with so many things in life, it's not about merely being ethical, it's about being outwardly, obviously and unambiguously ethical -- creating a ten-storey Gothic cathedral of an ethics policy with gargoyles and grotesques and tour guides and a 24/7 information booth, then putting an enormous sign on the roof saying "This Is Our Ethics Policy", and giving people a way to check. If there's no way anyone -- not even the thickest gainsayer -- can see wrongdoing, then you won't end up on the wrong side of a plausible internet smear campaign. And that's worth as much to the congregations you're trying to help as it is to you.
 

rickytherhino

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I think you are right. I definitely want to do this right as you bring up the point to protect the customer as well. Thanks again for your advice and review.

Regards,
Daniel
 
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