Welcome to the forums, Carissa!
Sure, it’s a very valid question, and one that is not uncommon. Obviously we want our photos too look as good as they possibly can, so when they look substantially worse after conversion, we tend to wonder “what went wong”! 🙂
You’re right that RAW files are not good for sharing with your friends and family, we definitely need to convert to JPG for sharing. The main reason for shooting RAW in the first place is to have complete control over the processing of your photos so that they can look their best. Once you have edited/tweaked them to your satisfaction, then you convert them to JPG to be shared with others.
First of all, what software were you using to convert the photos from RAW to JPG? Many photographers (including myself) use Adobe Lightroom, but there are plenty of other options. Adobe Photoshop has a built in RAW editor called “Camera RAW” if I’m not mistaken. I recently came across Affinity Photo which was just recently released for Windows, and still has some bugs to be ironed out, but it has a RAW editor as well. Then of course there’s the free option, RawTherapee. If you use one of the ” *nix ” operating systems, then there’s Darktable, but most people are on Windows, so I usually recommend Windows software.
If you don’t have any of the above software, let me know, and we can work from there. If you do have any of that software, then you’re in luck! You’ll just need a few tips about RAW processing and exporting to JPG files, and you’ll be flying solo pretty soon. 🙂