LDS Mingle Review

Posted on 29 November 2009

YOUR LDS MINGLE PROFILE

A profile on LDS Mingle is broken up into sections. The introduction, basic information, about me, fun facts, match preferences, the essays, and of course photos!

The first major portion of your profile is the Introduction. In this section you tell people a little about yourself in your own words. Remember, this section combined with your picture goes a long ways towards giving people insight into who you really are. This is where your personality should and does come out as you tell people the things that you think they ought to know about you. Take some time. Put some thought into what you put here. (This section is easily edited, so write. Read, rewrite, etc…until you are happy with what is written.)

Basic information
This includes a member’s: Gender, Location, Age and an indication of the type of relationship that you are looking for by selecting from dates, friends, or marriage (gasp!)

About Me
By selecting from drop down lists and checking those that apply a member shares: height, build, hair and eye color, relationship status (No, “separated” is not an option! It is an LDS online dating site!). The about me section also includes information about: your occupation, education level, how frequently you attend church, temple status, what languages you speak, your ethnicity and whether you served a mission or not and if so, where. LDS Mingle asks you to indicate whether you have children or not and whether you would like more or not. I know that having kids and whether or not you want more can be a deal breaker for some people, I personally hate this question. I think that is a very personal question and is better prayerfully discussed rather than put on the front page of an online profile. But, that is just me!

Fun Facts
The fun facts section is about your interests and the way that you spend you times. This section ask you to quickly describe yourself and to share musical taste, movie and television likes, the types of outdoor activities you enjoy, what other activities you enjoy, how punctual you are, how trendy you are, what type of food you like, your favorite restaurants, your political leanings, and what schools you’ve attended. Some of these items you choose from a list, others you list yourself.

Match Preferences
Is used to identify the kind of person you are looking for on LDS Mingle. You can and should review your preferences often, this helps with the two-way matching they do to put people into the recent match section of your homepage. You indicate your preference by age, location, height, body type, education, relationship status, church activity, temple status, mission, and ethnicity. For each of these you can indicate how important each individual characteristic is to you (not important, desirable, somewhat important, important or very important). You can choose whether you are shown matches by how closely they match your criteria, if matches are emailed to you and whether or not your match criteria appears on your profile or not.

Essays
LDS Mingle gives you the opportunity to let your personality show through in more than just the introduction. There are 6 essay questions that you can give answers to which will tell other members more about you and what you are looking for. Those questions include: the top three things I enjoy doing; the three things I least enjoy doing; If I had ten million dollars, I would; describe my perfect day; the area that I need the most improvement in; a few more things I would like to add. These essays are easily edited, so that you can change them and the impression that you leave people with as they visit your profile.

Photos
A profile on LDS Mingle (as with other online dating sites) can, and should, if you are serious about meeting people, a profile photo and a photo album. A profile picture is one of the key elements in making your profile more appealing to those browsing and search profiles. The guidelines for posting a profile picture on LDS Mingle are:
recent photo of you (duh!) distinctly shown and modestly clothed
no cartoons, graphics, collages, photos of celebrities or swimsuit photos
photos should be JPG, GIF, PNG or BMP format that is between 40KB and 5MB

LDS Mingle reviews all the photos which are posted within 48 hours of being uploaded and they reserve the right to remove any photos they feel are not appropriate or violate the guidelines. And, speaking from personal viewing experience, the photos on LDS Mingle are usually very tasteful and modest! I personally appreciate that.

One quick note: You can customize the theme (color scheme) for the pages that you view. The choices are interesting and don’t really make much difference in the experience. I changed mine to the passion fruit theme. It thought it was a little brighter.

NAVIGATING LDS MINGLE

The Dashboard on your home page makes LDS Mingle simple, easy and fun to navigate. From your homepage (or from anywhere on the site) you can quickly navigate to all the features of this site. You navigate by selecting from four main areas:

• Your Home Page
• Connect: Inbox, Chat, IM, Message Boards
• Search: Quick Search, Username Search, Advanced Search, Who’s Online, Photo Shuffle, Recently Updated, Photo Gallery, “Think You’d Click?”, Today’s Birthdays, Question of the Week.
• My Profile: (primarily for editing purposes) Basic Information, About Me, Fun Facts, Match Preferences, Essays, Color Code, Photos, Question of the Week.

CONNECT WITH OTHER LDS MINGLE MEMBERS
Above and beyond the normal ways of connecting with people that other online dating sites offer (mail, flirts, message boards and instant messaging), LDS Mingle offers its members the opportunity to connect directly with other members in real-time in their chat rooms. There are 5 chat rooms available: a Main Room and then four rooms broken down by age group (20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s). In the several weeks that I have been using the chat rooms, I have found the people who frequent them to be very friendly and quick to help you learn the chat room lingo (it’s like texting, there’s a “speak”) and how the rooms work. The rooms are really easy to use though if you’re not paying attention, it can quickly become very difficult to follow the conversations when there are a lot of people in the room and several different topics being discussed simultaneously. LDS Mingle does provide one basic guideline for using the chat feature: “Member engaging in sexual, vulgar, abusive, or inappropriate behavior in chat and IM will be deleted from the site.” LDS Mingle scans chat and IM conversations and encourages its users to report inappropriate behavior. I’m mentioned it before, but I’ll repeat it here: the message boards and chat rooms are a great way to get to “know” someone without the “risk” of contacting them directly. (A quick note: I’ve complained in some of my other online dating site reviews about not having pictures when reading messages, LDS Mingle doesn’t have this problem.)

SEARCHING WITH LDS MINGLE
Searching for your match on LDS Mingle isn’t as complex or complicated as other sites. Realistically, there are only three true search options offered by this site: quick search, username search, and an advanced search
The quick search allows you to search for someone of a specific gender and age range. You can determine whether you want to include keywords in your search (and no, a search for “root beer” didn’t net me any results) and whether the results show only members with photos.
The advanced search (do I really need to discuss a username search?) allows you to add additional parameters to your quick search. For instance: where someone lives, height, ethnicity, education, relationship status, body type, whether they served a mission or not, current temple status, church activity level, and whether or not they have children or not. This search also allows you to narrow your search to people who have recently been active and how recently their profile was created.
Despite having limited, though effective, search options, LDS Mingle does have quite a few “browsing” options. You can browse who’s online, you can check out random photos based on an age range of the opposite gender, you can check out profiles that have recently been updated in someway (new photos, new essays, or updated information), you can view the latest member photos filtered by gender, age range and how recently the photo was posted. Another interesting “search” category is the “Think You’d Click?” feature. The idea is that LDS Mingle randomly shows you profiles of the opposite gender within an age range and you indicate whether or not you are interested (no, maybe, yes). When you select “yes” LDS Mingle confidentially finds out if that person might be interested in you as well. If there is mutual interest they will “introduce” you with a Click! alert. Don’t worry with this feature, it’s not just about looking at the photos and making your indication. The process shows part of the profile and gives you the option of seeing more of the profile before you make your selection.
The final “search” category allows you to see who might be having a birthday today. If you see someone you know (or someone you’d like to know), you can then opt to send them a card. (For more information about the cards see below)

FLIRTING ON LDS MINGLE
There are several ways to flirt with other LDS Mingle members and I thought I would quickly highlight these because for the Guest Members these flirts are the only way you can contact other LDS MINGLE singles in whom you are interested while you are trying the site out. However, if that person emails you back, all you are going to know it that you received an email you won’t be able to know who sent it or even read the email. (So, if there is someone you really like, you are going to have to join. The Flirts on LDS Mingle are broken down into three categories: sparks, smiles, and cards.

Sparks are designed to begin a dialogue with another member. They are questions you send which have a list of possible answers. The sparks are broken down into the following topics: analogies, comparisons and metaphors; casual; dreams/wishes; opinion/taste; personality; practical/financial; seasonal; situational; and Dating/Relationship.
Smiles are little notes that help you quickly and briefly communicate something to another member. The smiles you send can be casual (Hey, What’s up?), Flirty (How YOU doin?), about sending and receiving emails, about profile photos, a pick up line (Cupid called. He says to tell you he needs my heart back), about their profile, a response to something another said (I’m flattered. Thank You.), to tell you more about them, a Thank you (Thanks for the smile, it made my day!) or about getting together (Can I take you out to dinner?).
The cards are creative graphics (they’ve actually put a lot of time into designing them) with customizable messages. You can send cards for special occasions like Birthdays, the seasons and Holidays, to express care and concern and to say thank you. There are cards for expressing friendship, love and just to flirt. The Pick up Line cards are funny. And being the movie buff that I am, I like the Movie Quote Pick Up Line Cards: “I think I’d miss you even if we’d never met!” (The Wedding Date)

EVENTS
LDS Mingle posts notification of LDS singles events on your homepage. These events include things like Singles Cruises, Dances, and Singles Conferences. I did notice that many of the events listed seem to be located in the mountain west or California; that may simply be reflective of the general population of the site or who is actively posting to the event board. (If you are aware of an event that you think might be of interest to other LDS Mingle members, you can post the event yourself.)

PROFILE MATCHING

LDS Mingle offers its members the opportunity to take the Color Code Personality Test. The intent of the color Code Personality Test is to define what makes motivates you (makes you tick). The different colors have different motivations. I’m a blue and therefore my core motivation is intimacy. That’s not physical intimacy; I need connection – the sharing of rich, deep emotions that bind people together. Reds core motivation is power, for whites it is peace and for yellows it is fun. (As a note, I took the Color Code Personality Test years ago at a seminar that I was at. I was a Blue then as well. The author maintains that your core color is intrinsic and doesn’t change. There seems to be some evidence of that in my retaking it more than a decade later.) Taking the Color Code Personality Test is totally voluntary. While the test is a series of comparative questions, it’s relatively easy and takes just about 15 minutes. After taking the Color Code Personality Test, you can see how you and other members who have taken the test would match up. LDS Mingle provides a message board where you can discuss your colors and ask questions about the Color Code. If you would like to learn more about the Color Code and its author, you can also visit the Color Code Website.

COOL EXTRAS BY LDS MINGLE

There are a couple of other things that LDS Mingle does which separates it from some of the other LDS sites. The first of which is that LDS Mingle has set up a beta version for mobile viewing. As a member of LDS Mingle, from your phone, and thus anywhere that you have service, you can read messages, view friends, search profiles, send mail, view matches and play with the “Think You’d Click? feature. You can have LDS Mingle send you a text every time that you receive an email. As an additional feature -or separate if you prefer- to the phone browser viewing, you can elect to receive a text message anytime that you receive mail, a smile, a card, a profile, an IM and/or a “Mutual Yes Alert.”

ANNOYANCES

The big glaring annoyance with LDS Mingle is how busy the pages are, especially the homepage. Take a look at the screenshot again. Talk about visual overload. There are advertisements (I will rant about those in a minute), profile activity, matching information and pictures, your links, searches, friends, events…ahhhh! I wish they’d tone it down just a little bit. The other thing that annoys me is the placement of the pages. Why can’t they be centered? Why do they have to be all the way left? (Am I being too picky?)

As with the other sites I’ve reviewed, a really bothersome issue with LDS Mingle is the third party advertisements (sponsored links they call them) that are placed throughout the site. I appreciate that by having those links, the site is able to offer memberships at a more reasonable price. However, the placement of them, especially on the homepage is irksome at best and as annoying as fingers on a chalkboard at worst; especially with the homepage being so busy already. I also really don’t enjoy reading someone’s profile with a big ad taking up half the introduction page.

SIGNING UP FOR LDS MINGLE

There are several subscription options to choose from. You can choose to sign up on a month by month basis for $14.99 with a monthly renewal at the same price. You can pre-pay 3 months in advance for $35.97 with a monthly renewal rate of $11.99. You may also go for the gusto and pre-pay 6 months for $59.94 (a 33% savings from the monthly subscription) with a monthly renewal rate at the end of the 6 months of $9.99.

The payment options are not as limited as some of the other sites that I have reviewed. You can pay by credit card, by mail (if you pay six months) and, by Pay-Pal (Wahoo!). Both the pay by mail and the pay-pal option require that you select the 6 month option and subsequent renewal rate. (And just in case you are brazen enough to not only believe that one of your single friends should be using online dating, but have the moxie to get them there, you can buy them a gift subscription using with above options!)

Despite my frustrations with LDS Mingle, I enjoyed the reviewing the site. With all of the features, it took me a little longer than I wanted it to. I really enjoyed the chat rooms (so, you may catch me there sometime) the people were really fun and it was a great way to make friends. And after the initial learning curve, I was able to maneuver around pretty easily. I don’t know if I would have thought that LDS Mingle was so complicated, it I hadn’t reviewed it after I reviewed LDS Planet. (Planet is by far a cleaner and easier to use site.) I love some of the features that LDS Mingle offers that her competitors don’t (the chat rooms for instance and the Cards). I’d easily recommend LDS Mingle to anyone who wants to have online dating as part of their repertoire for finding their eternal companion.

Click here if you are ready to try LDS Mingle out for yourself.

Remember: We’re LDS! We’re single! And, we’re all in this together!