Simply Searching - Bringing People Together

Frequently Asked Questions

The Service and our Goal

What is Simply Searching?

Simply Searching is a web-based service designed to bring people together from all walks of life, of any age and physical ability for friendship and to encourage and promote the participation in events, activities and areas of special interest across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

What is Simply4Kidz?

Part of the Simply Searching service specifically for children between the ages of 4 and 12 who can search for sports, events and activities specific to their age group..

What is Simply4Teenz?

Part of the Simply Searching service specifically aimed at 13 to 17 year olds to search for sports, events and activities specific to their age group.

What is The Collaborative Project?

The Collaborative Project encourages public participation in projects that are fun, interesting and creative. Sponsored by Simply Searching all of its projects are free.

What is Interesting Places to Visit?

Interesting Places to Visit is part of the Simply Searching service designed to allow people to find places to visit, such as a tourist attraction, nice beach or landmark, etc.

It is user contributory so that the public can recommend places that they have been for others to visit.

From where did the idea originate?

The about us page contains more information relating to the origin of the idea for Simply Searching and what we intended to achieve.

Why activities and events?

We ourselves are very active people and participate in sports such as squash, tennis, cycling, rock climbing, etc, and we have wanted to find people or clubs in the past. The outcome of our market research was that other people also had problems finding facilities or other people with whom to take part in these activities.

Further discussions then led to other interests such as dancing, photography, writing, reading, backgammon and even knitting. We therefore wanted to extend the idea further to encompass any event, activity, special interest or just to make new friends. Our strap-line sums up what we are trying to achieve.

“Whatever the age, whatever the interest or physical ability, bringing like-minded people together.”

Is it true that the service is free?

Yes it is free.

It is free for Event Organisers to sign-up and display their facilities to members. It is also free to create Events to promote any public participation.

It is also free for the public to sign-up to carry out simple searches to find facilities, events, other members, send messages and to apply to events and activities.

Is it also true there is no advertising?

Yes, it is true.

Adverts can be distracting, they can slow the service down and more importantly most people don't constantly want to be sold things.

From the very beginning we always intended the service to be advert free. So there you have it - a service free from advertisements!

Are there events for all ages?

Simply Searching shows events and activities that are specific to adults, children and families. It does require that people are over the age of 18 to sign-up and use the other features of the service. This is due to the government's legal guidelines on the protection of children on the internet.

Simply4Kidz and Simply4Teenz allows searching for events, activities and facilities specific to their age group.

Event Organisers

What is an Event Organiser?

This is the generic term that we have used to refer to any company, organisation, group, club or association which provides events, activities or facilities in which the public can participate or use.

What if we are a museum or tourist attraction?

It is of our opinion that irrespective of the nature of your business if you provide the public a facility of interest, entertainment or leisure then you can use Simply Searching so that what you have to offer can be found as the result of a very simple search. i.e. Show me all museums within 10 miles of Hove, Brighton.

Is the service free for Event Organisers?

Yes. From the outset, it was our opinion that the service must be free as an incentive for organisers to want to sign up. This ensures that everyone using the service benefit from finding as many events, activities and interests from across the country as possible.

What does an Event Organiser get from Simply Searching?

It is our intention to be a nationwide recognised service and one of the first things that people think of when they want to find out what is going on in their local community. To this end an Event Organiser can expect maximum exposure. It is easy for people to find facilities and events for free as the result of a simple search.

How does an Event Organiser sign-up?

Signing up is easy. Please visit the sign-up page, enter basic details and validate your login, it's as simple as that. Complete your details and your profile and that's all that is required to start promoting your facilities. You can then create as many events as you wish as far in the future as you require.

What is the Event Organiser approval process?

All Event Organiser registrations will require approval to ensure that your sign-up is genuine and that you offer the public some form of event or activity participation.

This will not affect you completing your profile, your details and loading your events. It will however mean that you won't show up in search results until approval has been granted.

It is our intention to approve all registrations within four hours although in busy periods this make take up to twenty four hours.

Registration

Signing-up

The activity and event search is open to the public although if you wish to send a message to an organiser or register for an event you need to sign-up. This is necessary to ensure your privacy and security as well as that of our organisers, especially due to scamming and spamming which is so rife on the internet.

Sign-up is completely free and will always remain so for anyone over the age of 18. Not only can you sign-up to events, send messages to organisers and save favourites, you can also search for like-minded people, send messages and add favourites. There are also optional features that you can subscribe to for as long as you want to use them.

Notifications

Notifications costs just £1.99 a month and allows you to be notified by email when there are any events up and coming which match your criteria.

e.g. 'When there is a country fair being held within 10 miles of my location to which the whole family can attend.

You don't need to do anything else. You can sit back and and we will notify you by email and message when an event matches your criteria.

You can setup as many search notifications as you wish. You can also save searches so you don't need to input the criteria each time.

You can downgrade back to 'free' at any point and it will not cost you anything further.

Social Messaging

Social Messaging costs just £3.99 a month and includes all of the features of Notifications.

In addition, you can save searches for like-minded people, you can save favourites and you can read messages sent to you by other people.

You can even be notified by email of someone who matches your search criteria - whether they have just signed-up or change their profile to include any new interests or hobbies.

You can downgrade back to 'free' at any point and it will not cost you anything further.

All Features

All Features is just £4.99 a month and includes the features of Notifications and Social Messaging as well as some truly very exciting features.

All Features is coming in June 2009.

Why do I have have sign up at all?

The purpose of having an individual login to the service is so that we can keep the whole process as secure as possible and that we can store information relevant to your login details. This allows you to perform searches without needing to re-enter your location, save your search criteria, express interest and sign-up to events and communicate with Event Organisers. It also ensures your contact details are held securely and allows you to manage your messages privately.

Are my details safe?

Yes they are. We take great pride in the security and protection of your data. Read the Privacy Policy for more information.

Do I have to be over the age of 18 to use the service?

Anyone of any age can use the public search pages without signing-up. Signing up is only necessary to contribute information or to use the other features that are available. You must be over the age of 18 to sign-up to use the service.

Simply Searching accommodates events and activities for people of all ages and the whole family.

Why do you charge for the advanced features?

Whilst it was always our intention to provide as much functionality to the Event Organisers and British public as possible, at the end of the day we need to make money to survive.

We do not like advertising and we will never ever sell information about our users so the only way for us to survive is to charge a small fee for the advanced features we offer.

We hope you will agree that its great value for money, especially the fairness of only paying for features for as long as you wish to use them.

Do you do offers or incentives?

As our prices are so low anyway we consider this to be an incentive in itself. We will consider promotional offers in the future.

Can I pay on a monthly basis?

We only offer a monthly payment scheme. We decided that this was the fairest method to all our members due to the very small outlay each month and the fact that you can upgrade or downgrade your membership at any time.

Do you provide refunds?

Our terms and conditions state that we do not provide refunds. The reason for this is primarily that we are charging such a small amount for the service, when you factor in all our associated costs together with administration it represents such a small fraction of the original amount.

You have full control over your membership and therefore you can upgrade and downgrade as you wish and only pay for the features you require.

An Evolving Service

What does the future hold for Simply Searching?

From our point of view the future is very exciting.

Part of what we are trying to achieve runs parallel with Government initiatives to get the UK public active and healthy and we are proud to be championing such a good cause.

It also provides a wonderful mechanism for people to be able to find each other through common interest or hobby. We think everyone will admit to being so busy these days that having a fantastic tool such as this will hopefully enable them to extend their social network.

We will continue to develop the service in conjunction with popular requested changes and continue to provide as much free and value-added features as we can to improve the service.

Our watchword will always be to keep things simple.

Can I have a say in how the service evolves?

Yes you can, in fact we positively encourage it. At the end of the day this is your service, you use it and we want it to reflect what you desire.

Of course we can't implement every feature that everyone asks for but we will endeavour to implement commonly requested features and functionality where requested by our members or event organisers.

Help and assistance

Can I get help to use the service?

Each key field provides a hover text description to explain its purpose. You can see this by putting your mouse pointer over it. Most key pages have a help button with an explanation of what that page does.

If you really get stuck, contact us, we want to make sure you are able to use the service without any problems at all.

What if I need to talk to someone?

If you would rather speak to someone give us a call on 0845 33 11 108 (office hours) or use our contact form to get in touch.

Additional information

Where did the idea for the name Simply Searching come from?

We wanted to come up with a name that says exactly what we do. The key aim was to always keep things as simple as possible, secondly we allow for people to search for whatever they are looking for. The obvious choice was therefore Simply Searching.

In addition to this, the tagline 'Bringing People Together' is exactly what is being achieved, therefore we felt that was rather an appropriate addition to the name.

Simpy4Kidz and Simply4Teenz were obvious choices due to the relevant market that we are targeting.

What is your logo?

The logo is the representation of a number of things in relation to the service we provide.

The initials SS for Simply Searching
The representation of a ball as a ball is used in many sports or activities
The two letter S's are symbolic of two people
The form of the image is in similar representation to Yin and Yang where separate parts are both equal and opposite and fit together to make a whole.

Apart from that we also thought it would be nice to have a logo or symbol that represented the brand Simply Searching. We are very pleased with the result.

What made you choose the particular telephone number?

Having been given a list of numbers to choose from we felt it difficult to decide so we decided to look for some meaning within the numbers.

In the end we decided on 0845 33 11 108 due to numerological definitions, lucky numbers and the appearance of a certain birth date combination.

It was also important that we chose a local rate number so that everyone felt comfortable dialling a number which wasn't going to cost them more than a local rate call.

Is the name Simply Searching or the logo trademarked?

By the very nature of us using this mark of our trade, yes it is trademarked. However we are currently going through the registration process and hope this to be completed in due course.

If you have any questions then please let us know by either calling us on on 0845 33 11 108 or using the contact form.

Simply Searching - Bringing People Together

Frequently Asked Questions

The service and our goal

Event Organisers

Registration

An evolving service

Help and assistance

Additional Information

The Service and our Goal

What is Simply4Kidz?

What is Simply4Teenz?

What is The Collaborative Project?

What is Interesting Places to Visit?

Event Organisers

Registration

An Evolving Service

Help and assistance

Additional information