I've received this message from Neil McGee, founder of a new venture called www.CatholicOnlineDating.co.uk, he writes:-
Catholic Dating UK & Ireland (www.CatholicOnlineDating.co.uk)
is a free online community for Catholic singles in the UK and Ireland.
"In 2013 I was a typical single Catholic living in London. Like many I originally moved to the city for work with no local Catholic connections, and it took over a year to get involved with a wonderful young adults group in my local parish in Ealing. Balancing difficult work commitments that involved lots of late nights and travel, it was hard to meet as many new people as I would have liked, so I started looking at Catholic online dating.
Probably the biggest problem with the existing Catholic dating sites I found was that they had very few members near where I was in the UK, and those they did have they publicly displayed their photos and basic info as marketing material to attract more members. Reading through online reviews I doubted if some of these sites had true Catholic intentions or were run primarily as profit-making enterprises.
Having left my full time IT job, I worked full time on creating a UK/Irish Catholic dating website. Doing all the development and programming myself kept costs low. It also let me build in extras that I haven’t seen elsewhere, like Daily Readings or writing prayers into the website code itself (I wrote about this on https://churchpop.com/2016/04/13/secret-catholic-prayers-hidden-website-code/).
In February 2015 we launched the website and started marketing it mainly through Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth via friends and family. A year later, we had about 500 active users, and as I write (July 2016) we have about 900 active members.
Now that the hardest technical challenges of the website have been overcome, our clear goal is to keep building the community for Catholics in the UK and Ireland and increasing the number of regular active users. I love to think that we can help open the door to future Catholic marriages and families. On the other hand, through opportunities that have opened for me to work on short term projects as a freelance IT consultant, I’ve also been blessed with a way to keep covering costs and developing the website for the long term.
As we don’t have a budget for advertising, we rely on people who share our website (https://www.CatholicOnlineDating.co.uk) with their friends, local parish or on Facebook. There’s a question on registration that asks how people first heard about us, and every time we’re mentioned in a parish bulletin or an article we get a good number of signups from that area! If you have any doubts or would like to know more, you can contact me directly via neil@catholiconlinedating.co.uk and I can give you a call or email back. If you have any ideas on how we can reach out to more people that would also be most welcome."
"In 2013 I was a typical single Catholic living in London. Like many I originally moved to the city for work with no local Catholic connections, and it took over a year to get involved with a wonderful young adults group in my local parish in Ealing. Balancing difficult work commitments that involved lots of late nights and travel, it was hard to meet as many new people as I would have liked, so I started looking at Catholic online dating.
Probably the biggest problem with the existing Catholic dating sites I found was that they had very few members near where I was in the UK, and those they did have they publicly displayed their photos and basic info as marketing material to attract more members. Reading through online reviews I doubted if some of these sites had true Catholic intentions or were run primarily as profit-making enterprises.
Having left my full time IT job, I worked full time on creating a UK/Irish Catholic dating website. Doing all the development and programming myself kept costs low. It also let me build in extras that I haven’t seen elsewhere, like Daily Readings or writing prayers into the website code itself (I wrote about this on https://churchpop.com/2016/04/13/secret-catholic-prayers-hidden-website-code/).
In February 2015 we launched the website and started marketing it mainly through Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth via friends and family. A year later, we had about 500 active users, and as I write (July 2016) we have about 900 active members.
Now that the hardest technical challenges of the website have been overcome, our clear goal is to keep building the community for Catholics in the UK and Ireland and increasing the number of regular active users. I love to think that we can help open the door to future Catholic marriages and families. On the other hand, through opportunities that have opened for me to work on short term projects as a freelance IT consultant, I’ve also been blessed with a way to keep covering costs and developing the website for the long term.
As we don’t have a budget for advertising, we rely on people who share our website (https://www.CatholicOnlineDating.co.uk) with their friends, local parish or on Facebook. There’s a question on registration that asks how people first heard about us, and every time we’re mentioned in a parish bulletin or an article we get a good number of signups from that area! If you have any doubts or would like to know more, you can contact me directly via neil@catholiconlinedating.co.uk and I can give you a call or email back. If you have any ideas on how we can reach out to more people that would also be most welcome."
