VIÑA DEL MAR, Chile — On the first day of May the countdown began. With the slogan: “A Whole Mormon World”, the creation of a new website began to be shared, and it will be launched on May 15th. In less than an week it reached over 1,000 fans on Facebook.
Mormon Finder is the name of this new portal, which promises to be “a web platform available at MormonFinder.org (also with a mobile version) which will allow people to find websites and content related to LDS Church”, says Sebastián, the leader and funder of this project. Mormon Finder is not an official website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but it is developed by LDS members.
Sebastián has been working on the Mormon Finder Project for 2 years. Since then, the project has evolved and has included other collaborators. The team currently consists of 12 members, professionals and students of different areas, who contribute from their respective fields of expertise. Thanks to them, the project has been improved in order to achieve a great number of users starting on May 15th.
Sebastián is Chilean, a returned missionary, a business administrator specialized in marketing, bishopric counselor of his ward and an enterprising person. He was kind enough to answer some questions from El Faro Mormón about this initiative.
What’s Mormon Finder about?
It’s about a display that consists of 25 different categories with more than 700 LDS linked websites (i.e.: family, music, movies, education, applications, travels, shops, youth, missionaries, etc.). You choose the category, according to your interests, and gain access to the websites, which are opened in a new window. We pretend to gradually increase the number of linked websites.
So, the website will be just a link to other sites?
No. In order to improve your browsing experience in Mormon Finder, we include news and articles, authorities’ quotes, a blog, and picture galleries related to the Church in each category. The pictures are provided by a LDS photographer’s team from different countries, who collaborate with Mormon Finder.
In addition, if you have a company or business (of any size) and your clients are LDS members, we offer you a space on the website to position your brand, site, products, etc. You just have to contact us and we’ll surely have something interesting for you.
How did this idea emerged and what’s its objective? Tell me about the history of Mormon Finder.
It started as a list of websites for my personal use. This list started to grow, as well as the idea of sharing it with the LDS community. As the project started to take shape, people from different areas of knowledge joined the team and now it consists of 12 people (LDS members and non-members), and we’re growing. Among the members there are designers, translators, photographers, editors, indexers, people who manage the area of marketing, social media, etc.
By the way, if you want to collaborate with your skills, you can send a request to join the team.
The objective is to bring LDS contents found on the web, closer to the Church members, gathering all of them in one place. That’s how we came out with the slogan: “A Whole Mormon World”. With this we want to make the access easier and get MF users to discover much more than they know about what’s related to the LDS world. Also, it’s part of our mission to share valuable content with our LDS community, and anyone who’s interested.
Will Mormon Finder be only for Latin American users?
No, many of the linked websites are from other countries and they’re even in English. We’re also translating blog articles and other contents into English, so we can reach a wider range of people.
How’s been the people’s response? What’s next?
People’s response has been excellent. In a week we already had more than 1,000 fans on Facebook, and many of them asked us what’s the project about, so we’ve been telling them, little by little through social media, about what Mormon Finder is going to be about and how much they’re going to like it when it’s launched on May 15th.
From now on, the number of linked sites is going to increase, there’s going to be a lot more of them! Also, there will be more articles, news, contests, interviews, versions in different languages, and more surprises.
The website hasn’t been launched yet. Where can we find Mormon Finder before May 15th?
We haven’t launched the website yet, but if you enter MormonFinder.org you’ll see a countdown time in days, hours, minutes and seconds, until the webpage is launched.
Meanwhile, you can find us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest, where we share information about the website and other interesting things.
There’s a question that some YSA have made about the purpose of the website, maybe because of the name of it: will Mormon Finder be a tool to find husband or wife?
[Laughing] Despite Mormon Finder has a special category for YSA and single adults, with a lot of sites for that purpose and tools to get to know each other, this is not the main goal of MF, because there are more than 24 categories more to enjoy. Nevertheless, we have added a chat on the MF site where you could, eventually, meet someone from the LDS community.
The 25 categories include any kind of content and tools, which will interest LDS members, such as children, young men and women, single adults, adults, etc.
