You are not who you say you are.
Here me out… I’m not saying you’re lying or being disingenuous. But, a church, school, ministry or business can put whatever it wants on its website, mission statement, promotional materials, etc.
People will read it, but they won’t take your word for it. They will look for corroborating evidence.
Your reputation is not what you say you are. It’s not even what other people tell you they think of you. It’s what they say about you when you’re not around.
Where are people talking about you when you’re not around?
Online reviews
Checking online reviews is a fundamental part of the shopping process – whether a person is shopping for Christmas gifts, investigating private schools, or looking for a new church.
Research from BrightLocal reveals “91 percent of consumers rely on reviews regularly or at least occasionally to inform their purchase decisions.”
But most organizations – especially nonprofits ministries, schools and churches – are completely complacent when it comes to online reviews. That is until they get a bad review. Then they totally freak out.
I’ve had several people from businesses and nonprofits contact me in a panic, “Someone posted a negative review about us online! How do we get it removed?!?”
Sorry, but you can’t remove negative reviews from sites like Google and Yelp.
The best way to handle negative online reviews?
You can try to reach out to the person who posted the negative review, try to make things right and hope they will change their review, however…
The best way to handle negative online reviews is to be proactive about getting positive reviews.
Nobody’s perfect. Everyone knows that. When people check online reviews, they’re not expecting all 5-star ratings. But people will form a very different opinion about your organization if you have 1 negative review and 0 positive reviews verses if you have 1 negative review and 20 positive reviews.
Furthermore, more online reviews will improve where your organization ranks in local search engines.
The good news is BrightLocal’s research also reveals 70% of consumers will leave a review for a business when asked.
So, get to work and start asking your business customers, your school’s parents, your ministry supporters, or your church members to post online reviews, especially on Google and Yelp. Email them. Bring it up in your next meeting.
Discuss
- Have you ever gotten a negative online review? How did you react?
- What if anything are you doing to get more online reviews?
5 Comments
Hi Paul, great article updated 🙂 For the reviews, sure I have got negative reviews, but the reviews were not sent by the visitors or the customers, but from my competitor, we have nothing to do but disabled the all the reviews in the site, that is not good but no other way to resolve it 🙂 Thank you for your great article again 🙂
Hi Robby, on what site(s) can you disable reviews? I’m pretty sure you can’t turn off reviews on Google local listings or Yelp.
Hi Paul, our site created by OpenCart platform, there is a plugin could disable all the reviews 🙂 aha, sure, maybe we can not trun off reviews on Google local listings, agree with you:) For disable all the reviews, really not good, since we have to disable many positive reviews of our customers together.
So, what about when someone gives you one out of five stars because they’re a little racist and didn’t like your sermon about the church being “for equality?” That’s when you go on with life and try to maintain a good reputation with everyone else on the planet. 🙂
Hey Brandon, there’s one negative review I wouldn’t mind getting. LOL! I’ve found sometimes when people leave unfair negative reviews, they reveal more about the heart of the reviewer than the organization getting the review.