CaringBridge Comes of Age in an Age of Social Media

Pelton called Mehring one night: “I said, ‘I think we need one of those CaringBridge sites for my sister. Can you set one up for me?’ And she said, ‘Well, Sami, I know what you know about technology, and we’re building this Web-based product, that’s what our career is about. If you can’t set up your own CaringBridge site within three or four minutes, this thing’s not going to work.’”

That early need to prove that CaringBridge was easy to use left a legacy that shows up in at least two ways now. One is staffing. As a software developer who’d worked on everything from feed analysis for poultry producers to fantasy baseball, Mehring had considerable tech skills of her own. But even so, and even though she wanted to build awareness of CaringBridge, her first hire once she incorporated as a nonprofit in 2002 wasn’t a marketer, it was another strong IT person.

“I was really concerned with creating a service that was just really foundationally solid,” Mehring says, “a rock-solid service that doesn’t go down, that’s easy to use, that brings things that people need when they need it.” Today, a third or more of CaringBridge’s 45 employees are information technologists.

The other place that legacy shows up is as a still strong—and still relevant, Cuesta and CaringBridge agreed—element in brand messaging. In 1997, when Mehring built the first CaringBridge site for a friend going through a high-risk pregnancy, social media were an unknown, she says, but so was Google (it was founded the next year). For many people, the Internet itself was still strange new territory.

“Being easy to use is something we lead with because, especially back in the late ’90s, this was kind of a new frontier and people were scared of it,” Mehring says. “I used to always tell my mom, ‘Just click around, it’s fine. You’re not going to break the computer!’”

“There’s a wider continuum” of CaringBridge users now, including many who spend hours a day on line, but conveying ease of use still matters, she says. The demographic still tends toward what Mehring calls the “Aunt Bettys” of the world, people who aren’t technology oriented. More important, empowering users is central to CaringBridge’s identity and has been from the start.