Projects: Supporting Network

Supporting Network is an organization with a mission to help caregivers and bereaved people find a safe community to share their stories about their loved ones, information, resources, & most important, to offer & receive support from other bereaved people.

Presently Supporting Network offers, through a hospice or other social service agencies, access to a private, secure website where members may interact with other people experiencing grief. Supporting Network has been uniquely designed by social media and end of life care professionals to provide a state of the art meeting place on the internet. The organization needed a private, secure infrastructure to allow them to efficiently manage a number of independently branded bereavement social networks.

Requirements included:

1. Different levels of participation :

i. Organizations or individual parents/families can join the Supporting Network community.

ii. Organizations can deploy their own “micro-site” (such as George Mark) with their unique look and feel and brand identity. A micro-site can opt to participate in the broader Supporting Network community or may elect to retain a closed community affiliated with the organization.

iii. Organizations can have a presence on Supporting Network’s site without having to deploy a whole micro-site, through which they can also elect to participate in the broader Supporting Network community. Essentially, this tier allows a smaller organization to link to their Supporting Network community from their own website.

2. Strong focus on privacy and security. Members are able to create both public and private groups and extend invitations to other members to join. These also include one-on-one groups where Supporting Network staff can provide counseling.

3. The ability to allow members to create memorial pages in which they can upload images, videos and other content that can be shared both within the network and externally. Invitees are able to upload their own photos, videos and comments if given permsission by the page creator/author.