I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the impact that So You’re EnGAYged had on my health. The site was (and is) awesome – it gave me so many opportunities to make new friends, learn new things about building a website, and be a part of a cause that I deeply care about. However, over the past year or so, all of this began to be overshadowed by one thing: awful, hurtful e-mails.

I anticipated getting some hate mail. Every website does! When we started SYE, we thought it would come in the form of bigoted comments, and we focused a ton on moderating thoroughly. But I was wrong. The hate mail wasn’t from homophobes or random readers. For every 100 awesome vendors that we talked to, there was one terrible email from a wedding vendor that left me in tears.

Rarely were these vendors bigots – I want to make that clear. The hate wasn’t about our cause or about the LGBT community. It was that these vendors weren’t getting their way, and they felt entitled. They didn’t recognize that we put our readers before our vendors – that readers are, and will always be, our #1 priority.

If we felt that a vendor’s website had heteronormative language on it, I’d ask them to revise it. If a vendor had no reviews on a third party website, I’d ask them to email us again when they did. We would never reject an applicant in these cases (it takes a LOT to get an official rejection from us), we would always ask them to revise and contact us again when it’s updated. We even offered a free guidebook to help them change any heteronormative language to inclusive language. We did everything we could to help vendors be good fits for the site in all the kind ways we could think of. For context, here is my form email to vendors who didn’t meet the inclusive language requirement:

Hello [Name] – Thanks so much for your application. I did notice that you have a few cases of heteronormative language (where it’s assumed that the reader or visitor is a part of a heterosexual couple) on your website, such as “[example copied from their site]“. We wrote a free guide on how to update your language to be more inclusive; could you please update your client-facing materials to be 100% inclusive and let me know when you’ve done so?

Thanks!
Lara

The nasty responses started with one or two that Kelly and I just laughed off. We believe in SYE and we believe that our rules are fair. I’m a pro at handling conversations politely and not playing a mean person’s game, and I took on the vendor communications. But as we continued and grew, we started getting more routine emails that weren’t real responses to the above message. They were more hateful, more nasty. The main kinds I’d receive were:

• “I’m gay, how DARE you not automatically accept me!”
• “I think you’re making up the word ‘heteronormative’! By eliminating the words ‘As the bride watches the groom walk down the aisle’ I will be offending straight people!”
• “You are straight. You have no idea what it means to be a part of this community, you bigot!”
• “Your site is TERRIBLE. I am withdrawing my application! How dare you say those things to me! YOU are TERRIBLE!”

Mostly, people just didn’t read the guidebook, and didn’t understand that “inclusive” language meant “applies to LGBT and straight couples alike”. Remember, these probably came in once or twice a month – not very much, right? But, like many of you already know, hateful words are much stronger than any other kind of word.

I might receive one of these emails, then receive another five emails from pleasant, terrific vendors. Not even twenty nice emails could alleviate the sadness and frustration I was feeling from the nastygrams. A few this year even had me questioning my self-worth – what was it I was doing to not be able to prevent these emails from coming in? I’d updated the vendor application countless times to make it super clear what our requirements were, even linking to the guidebook there. I felt totally worthless and like I’d failed. Nothing I could do could stop these words from appearing in my inbox. There was nothing I or others could do that would make me feel better after reading them.

I have Crohn’s disease, a chronic disease that is triggered by stress for me. After a week or so went by after a bad email, I’d start to forget about it. That was really the only thing that’d make me feel better. But still, my body wasn’t having it. As I continued to deal with random awful vendor emails, my Crohn’s would flare. No matter how positively/politely I thought I handled a response, I would still feel frustrated and upset. No matter how ludicrous a vendor’s words were, they still hurt.

I decided to write this post as a message to everyone, not just vendors. Everyone needs to remember how much their words have an effect. The internet can feel like a lovely, anonymous place where you can say what you want and you won’t see the impact it has on others. But it has a very real impact, one that for me was part of our July decision to stop working on real weddings and vendor listings.

I’m so glad that no vendors whose words stung would have made it near our vendor listings, and I’m so thankful for all of the terrific vendors who are up there. But health comes first, and our July decision has come with its own set of nastygrams from vendors (“but you should make an exception for ME!”). It’s reassured me that our decision was the right one.

Demographics first! Not much has changed since last year – So You’re EnGAYged has a predominantly lesbian readership. What we did change between last year and this year, thanks to a reader suggestion, was using checkboxes instead of radio buttons for indicating your identity and your partners’. Also, all questions were optional in this survey. Basically, that means we’re using bar charts instead of pie charts for this question!

Most of you are engaged, but we still have a very diverse readership, in terms of marital status, length of engagement, and wedding budget.

Next, we wanted to know how many of you have used of (or knew about) our vendor list. This was fascinating to us – ten percent didn’t know that it existed. (For those of you who didn’t know – here it is!) Our vendor list is central to how So You’re EnGAYged started (Kelly was having the hardest time finding an LGBT-friendly set of vendors in DC for her own wedding) so we want to make sure it’s serving its purpose.

7% of you have booked a vendor (yay!). 43% just looked without contacting, 11% contacted and hadn’t booked one. The rest didn’t, either because they didn’t know it was there, or they haven’t needed to.

One of the biggest sets of feedback we got from the survey was that you want more vendors in your area. There are two ways we can do this – one, by loosening our vendor requirements (which are very strict – all vendors must use 100% inclusive language, and they must have a 4 star or above review on a third party review site). Two, by you recommending them to us or sending them to us, or even just letting them know that they should apply. We asked, and you answered – the majority (69%) would like us to keep the list as thoroughly vetted as it currently is. Right now, we’re not accepting new vendors (as we’re swamped!).

Lastly, and most importantly – let’s talk about the regular blog content. Here’s what you guys are most interested in:

We hear you loud and clear on this – it’s actually what a lot of the written-in feedback said as well. More DIY, more talk about budgets and family issues, and DEFINITELY more butch attire posts. Like last year, we also heard (and totally agree with) the need for more diversity in bloggers. We hear you and we want the same!

Some of you wrote feedback asking for more posts from bloggers. This is interesting to us; currently, the majority of pageviews that we get for the site are on real wedding/engagement posts. Only 43% of the pageviews are on blogger posts.

We asked in the survey – would you rather have more weddings and engagements, or more blogger posts? 76% said weddings and engagements.

If you have any more feedback, we’d love to hear it in the comments. Thanks so much for participating in this year’s survey!

On average, I found that ads that showed a couple being romantic (rather than staring straight at the camera or something else) had a 17% higher click-through rate (CTR). Ads that were sized incorrectly (like you couldn’t really tell what the image was) got 63% less CTR than average. Ads that showed two women had a 38% higher average CTR.

After the advertisers sent in their updated ads, we also found that ads that switched from not showing an LGBT couple to showing an LGBT couple had an average 76% higher CTR.

Vendors, keep this in mind when you’re working with and marketing to LGBT couples! One of the things we hear over and over again is that vendors really need to show pictures of LGBT couples on their website, and this rings true with our sidebar ads as well.

And one last reminder: we are a volunteer-run site. Not one person who works on or contributes to SYE gets paid for their work or time (not even me or Kelly!). All money from the sidebar ads goes right to fund our overhead. That means that, while we are working as fast as we can to vet new applications or make changes to your current listing, it may take a while to hear back from us because of the current influx we’re receiving. Thanks so much for your patience!

If you’d like to help us out as a volunteer, please contact us! We are ALWAYS looking for people to help out around the site.

As always, you can submit anonymously, and we’ll post the results in a week. Thank you so much for taking the time to make SYE even better :)

Over the past year, we tweaked a ton of stuff on SYE based on what you wrote in last year’s survey. Please take a moment to fill out this year’s reader survey to let us know things like what you’d like to see from SYE, like what topics we should write about, how we should change our vendor list, etc.

As always, you can submit anonymously, and we’ll post the results in a week. Thank you so much for taking the time to make SYE even better :)

SO much has changed in the last year. We’ve ramped up our Real LGBT Weddings and Engagements. We’ve got a whole crop of new bloggers. We’ve reached 500 vendors on our vendor list. And we tweaked a ton of content based on what you wrote in last year’s survey, like focusing more on budgets and LGBT issues. Please take a moment to fill out this year’s reader survey to let us know things like what you’d like to see from SYE!

As always, you can submit anonymously, and we’ll post the results in a week. Thank you so much for taking the time to make SYE even better :)

Be sure to sign up so you don’t miss the next one – enter your email in our right sidebar! (Don’t worry, we’ll never sell/rent/otherwise share your email address!)