In a recent post we called CaringBridge® a fundraising superstar. CaringBridge gives away websites to let users—150,000 to date, they report—stay in touch with family and friends during a critical illness, treatment, or recovery.
Recently the organization launched Version 3 of their site, aimed at “making personal CaringBridge websites easier to use, visually streamlined and more customizable.” A new feature is a Spanish-language option.
We talked with founder and executive director Sona Mehring about the thinking behind the new features.
What did you learn from your users that helped you shape Version 3?
We have feedback elements available on our site, and through the years people have been very proactive about providing that. We also do surveys periodically to ask users what new features they’d like and what they’d like to see improved. In our most recent survey we collected over 4,000 responses.
Three themes emerged. Users wanted to be able to share photos and integrate them into their journals. They wanted additional control of their own privacy. And they wanted to be able to personalize the look and feel of their own sites more.
We keep abreast of trends in the industry: what are the bigger, more broadly public social networks doing? There we also saw a trend toward more privacy control. Since it’s important for us to continue to reach more people all the time, we also added the multilingual component as a way to serve Spanish-speaking families.
A lot of our feedback on the site also consists of users asking us not to change anything, so we have tried to be conservative, keeping the site as familiar as possible even as we add new enhancements.
How are you measuring the success of Version 3?
We are trying to make sure that people are still engaging with the service actively: that the number of new sites continues to grow at the same rate and that they are continuing to leave journal entries at the same rate.
For example, we now average around 180 new sites a day. That’s been growing at an average of 25 to 35 percent a month, so we’re looking to make sure that that growth rate is sustained.
