New “Friends for Families” Networking Site Wants LGBT Feedback

I read the other day about Friends for Families, a new “online matching service designed to help your family connect with other families in your area.” It’s similar to a site like Match.com, but instead of matching people for dates, it matches families wanting to meet other families for socializing. It matches them based on interests, viewpoints, ages of children, and a variety of other factors. Overall, it seems like a good idea. Certainly it’s been harder for my partner and I to socialize now that we have a child, and our lives are such that we move around a lot. I’ve met some people through my local moms group, but only a few with whom I feel I have much in common.

If you look at Friends for Families’ logo, however, you’ll notice it’s composed of two opposite-sex couples. I was thus going to write about how this is yet another example of “family” representations ignoring same-sex families, like the bathroom sign I wrote about last month.

Wanting to give Friends for Families a sporting chance before a flaming post, however, I decided to contact them to see if this was an oversight, and whether they were in fact open to including same-sex families in their service.

I received a very nice letter from CEO John McAuley, which he’s said I could reproduce below. (I’ve edited a bit for length.) He’s very open to including same-sex families, but could use some more feedback from us.

Our customer care guys sent this to me today and I wanted to personally respond. We gave this a lot of thought during the process of building our site. When we first began our research, we noticed lots of services already out there to help connect same-sex families. Surprisingly, there seemed to be more for same-sex families than for traditional families. So we didn’t see the need in the market. Do you see something different out there? Is there a real need for this kind of service for same-sex families that hasn’t already been addressed? If so, we would certainly be willing to discuss these with gay and lesbian couples that could help us better understand. The truth is that we don’t really have much direct experience with same-sex families so we need to be educated about the needs in that market. Let us know your thoughts. We anticipated these requests, just not this early. The fact that we have received it this early gives us the opportunity to learn more about the needs and issues with same-sex families. Thanks in advance for your feedback. Take care and let me know if I can answer any other questions.

I responded:

I think there are some services to connect same-sex families—various listservs and Meetup.com groups, for example, but nothing (to my knowledge) exactly like your service, which matches families on so many different variables. . . .

More importantly, while I may want to connect with other same-sex families, I’d also like to connect with opposite-sex families that have similar interests. A same-sex-only service may match me with other same-sex couples, but that’s it. Yes, I want to make sure some of my friends are same-sex couples, if only to show my son he’s not the only kid with two moms, but they don’t all have to be.

I don’t think it would take too much tweaking to make Friends for Families welcoming to all families. You’d need to let people indicate sexual orientation in their profiles, of course, but could treat it in the same way you do ethnicity—not as part of the scoring system, but so “Families who view your profile can decide if ethnicity [sexual orientation] is important to them.”

You might also have to change a few labels/terms in your profile—though without actually signing up myself, I’m not able to be too specific. (E.g., if you say “Spouse,” say “Spouse/Partner” instead.) Your logo is a little problematic, as it is very opposite-sex specific. I’m not a graphic designer, so I don’t have any great suggestions here, but there’s probably a way to make a cluster of people look less gender specific, yet still like families. You might also mix in some images of same-sex families on your homepage.

And John replied again:

Something I want to touch on a bit is the fact that our service is intended to serve as a tool to make the process of finding friends easier and more efficient. . . .

One of the key niche markets we see this doing well in is any family group that is in the minority. It’s just tough for those families to find other similar families without the proper tools to do so. Same-sex families is a perfect example. So are racial minorities and families moving from other countries. Just imagine a family from China moving to a remote part of Alabama. It seems logical to think they would be ecstatic if they had the tools to find the one other Chinese family that may be living in the same area. It’s not that we only want people to meet people just like their family, it’s just we know some things are “must-haves” when it comes to building strong relationships with other families.

. . . . We’re obviously excited about the product, we want to tell people all about it and we want feedback from every type of family out there to make our site the best it can be.

With that, I open it up to you, dear readers. Can you answer any of John’s questions or give him any other feedback? Would you or anyone you know find a service like Friends for Families useful? Or was his first reaction right in that same-sex families already have our own networks and would find little value in this?

(Thanks to Techcrunch for the initial sighting.)