Member deletions are good news?

I know it may seem weird, but Shelly and I always get a little excited when we get a member deletion email. When we first started iHeart these emails made us sick. We were trying to build a community, we couldn't afford to lose anyone. But after getting a couple of them it became obvious. People delete their dating site accounts when they meet someone they are serious about.

Ultimately, we came to realize that our goal is for members to delete. If you run a dating site and nobody deletes, then your site isn't working. We started iHeart with the goal of bringing good people together, which would result in them leaving our community. I remember our first deletion was because the user had met someone, but not on iHeartVolunteers. We were happy for them, but we wanted the relationship to have started on our site. Well, we recently received the best member deletion possible. Check it out.

Getting married deletion email!

As a new dating site this made us extremely proud. We look forward to many more!

A Shared Connection

When I first met my wife, we had an immediate connection because we both loved sports. She was the only girl in our building that played pick-up basketball, and I was always at the court looking for a game. She ended up transferring schools, and six years later we reconnected. Our love of athletics was still present, but what ultimately brought us together was our love for service. We had a shared desire to join the Peace Corps, which we did a year and a half after reuniting. We are not special though, the majority of single people are looking for someone like them. If you like sports, you'll want to date an athlete. If you love to play an instrument, you’re going to be attracted to musicians. If you love to go to church, you’re going to look for someone who shares your faith.

Our shared love for giant beers!

In fact, research shows that 60% of active online daters are looking for someone who shares their interests or hobbies. We started iHeartVolunteers because our love for service brought us together, and we want others to experience the same thing. Plus, our site offers more than finding a shared love for volunteerism. We offer another level to the online dating experience by screening our members volunteer service!

We care about our members and we want to present them with the best possible partner, so we screen. But that’s not the only reason, online dating has some negative aspects we’d like to prevent from occurring. It’s not uncommon for online daters to report being harassed or being made to feel uncomfortable by other members. Fifty-four percent of online daters complain that people seriously misrepresent themselves online, e.g. Christians not being very Christian or lumberjacks not loving lumber.

Screening can seriously help eliminate misrepresentation and harassment. Anyone can claim to be spiritual or religious, but a verified church volunteer is definitely committed to their faith. Being verified adds a level of accountability, it's less likely for a member to get their volunteer service verified and then engage in harassing behavior towards other members. (Side Note: We can't always verify volunteerism when we can't the user's account reads "Unverified". Check out our FAQ verification section for more info.) For those that do harass or bully, "Verified" or not, we gladly remove them from our site.

It's obvious, a website full of volunteers focused on creating a positive online dating environment is super awesome, and that's one of our priorities. Good people meeting good people, that's what it's all about.

Eighteen Days of Service, Kind of

Today's blog entry is about a post by the non-profit All for Good that I shared on our iHeartVolunteers Facebook page.  All for Good is a volunteer service that connects volunteers with service opportunities, they are a great organization. On top of that, I enjoy their Facebook posts; they are often insightful, motivational and humorous.

A couple weeks back they Facebooked this list of service ideas:

I looked at the list and thought, "I'd like to do this".

So I commented on the post from our iHeartVolunteers account saying, "We're going to do one a day until Christmas!! We'll let you know how it goes."

Shelly laughed about it, I tend to over-commit. I hadn't devised a plan on following through, and she knew it. I thought it would be easy. All of the tasks seemed very do-able. I made the comment on December 7th, I had only committed to 18 days of service. 

My plan was to pick an act of service each night and schedule it into my phone's calendar, as a helpful reminder. I wanted to ease my way into it, so I set a reminder to thank sincerely as many people as possible.

My reminder went off at eight AM, time to be thankful. The first person I thanked held the door for me. I was glad they did it, but I was a little overzealous and ended up yelling, "Thank you!". It was embarrassing. But, I recovered and ended up thanking a lot of people. Some sincerely, some loudly. It was a good day.

I planned on going to the grocery store the following day, so I set my reminder to return someone's cart. Turns out, I didn't get groceries. So,  I resorted to cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. I decided it would qualify as doing something special for my spouse. It was my only option, even though I knew my wife would not consider me cleaning the kitchen as doing a special act of service for her.

After that I fell apart. I know, that was quick. I did not end up living up to my end of the bargain. I have no excuses, some days I just didn't make it a priority. I ended up completing ten acts of service, so just over half. Not terrible, but I can't brag about it.

However, I am very glad I did it. One of the acts I ended up completing was writing a letter of appreciation. It made me happy. I felt like the people in this video:



The 10 acts of service I did, made me happy. It makes me wonder why I don't go out of my way to serve others more often. For that reason, I recently saved the service list as an image on my phone and set a recurring reminder to look at it.

Doing good makes us happy, and it's easy. I dare you to try it.