Santa Barbara hospice organization selects LifeEventNet.com to help families coordinate support from others

Recovering from serious injury and illness, or eventually saying final good-byes are among life's greatest challenges. These life events also put tremendous stress on a family.  It is the mission of Visiting Nurse & Hospice Care (VNHC) of Santa Barbara to assist families through these challenges with a comprehensive offering of in-home and inpatient services.

VNHC and Life Event Networks compliment one another in important ways and have just announced a partnership to provide a unique way for its families to support and care for one another through the LifeEventNet.com website. A free private webpage on LifeEventNet.com serves as a family-friendly place for communication and coordination. With LifeEventNet.com, a family will designate a close friend or trusted family member to keep everyone updated with current information and to schedule helpful chores or activities. Everyone stays informed, well-wishers can post their sentiments and offer assistance without imposing, and the family in crisis is not overwhelmed by too many random acts of kindness.

"People use web technology in their day-to-day lives and work, so patients and family members began asking us about it," says Pauline Jones, a registered nurse and COO of VNHC. "We provide physical, emotional and spiritual support to our hospice patients and families but folks were asking us how to help manage all the other people in their lives wanting to visit and offer help."

We've all seen how the initial outpouring of concern and deliveries of food that aren’t well matched to the longer-term needs of the family can actually add to the stress of the situation. What is needed is an easy way for a distressed family to communicate and manage the tangible ways that others can express their love and sympathy by doing something useful, like visiting during scheduled times, delivering a meal, providing home & yard maintenance, driving, arranging for flowers..."

"Our nurses and social workers confirmed this need and we selected Life Event Networks to be our trusted partner. It makes sense because most families require ongoing support as they move through a debilitating injury, a life-threatening illness or a life event such as grief," says Jones.

You can learn more about the services provided by Visiting Nurse & Hospice Care (VNHC) of Santa Barbara at http://www.vnhcsb.org. 

Life Event Networks Helping to Get Seniors Wired

 Life Event Networks has recently joined forces with IT firm, Swift Chip Ventura, and sponsor, Dignity Memorial, to provide web browsing training for seniors living in Independent and Assisted Living Residences. The objective of the “Seniors Gone Wired” Program is to help seniors access a safe place online to connect with friends and family, no matter where they are, thereby improving their quality of life and strengthening the bonds of family, friendship, and community.

See the note from the CEO (link to right) to learn more about why this may be important to more than the seniors in our lives.

Recent Development News

Even though it's been a while since we updated this page, the work I outlined in December has been keeping us plenty busy and we are getting closer to achieving several significant milestones, including a major website version upgrade and several civic & church collaborative projects.

The major thrust of our work during this period has been to refine the features we already have and to continue simplifying the user interface to make creating a new Life Event homepage even easier than it was. To give you a flavor of our progress, a few specific accomplishments include:

• A redesigned setup process that allows you to bypass scheduling Activities and inviting Participants until later. This change makes it easier to preview and edit the main webpage content before inviting Participants. Try it out at LifeEventNet.com.
• Refinements to the Update and Reminder emails that makes it easier to see what is happening in all of the Life Events you are part of.
• A more informative change indicator system that flags where there have been new posts or other changes to the webpage since your last visit.  Now you can find new information even faster.
• An improved My Information interface to make it easier to change your personal information and display options.
• Many refinements to the Organizer Reports to make them more informative and easier for the Organizer to keep an eye on things. Learn who is doing what and when in the Life Event in seconds.

I should also mention that we have expanded our Store offerings considerably and are now an affiliate of Amazon.com and Kayak.com, in addition to our former affiliations with 1800Flowers.com, PersonalCreations.com, PersonalizationMall.com, FineStationary.com, Zazzle.com, and many vendors of quality items that beautifully support a myriad of Life Events.  You may not have known this, but when you use the LifeEventNet.com Store to find and purchase product from one of our partner vendors, you help support our efforts to provide you with free webpages AND it doesn't cost you any more than if you went directly to the website to make your purchase.  This a win-win for you and us!

Finally, we are getting close to releasing a new repeating Activity scheduling capability that will make it easier for you to schedule a series of Activities that occur on regular intervals. This is an example of a major feature change that we have planned for several months and are excited to be doing the final testing on it now before letting you take it for spin.

Please let us know what you think of LifeEventNet.com using the Feedback page and tell your friends about us.  Thanks!  -David Lantrip

What's new at LifeEventNet.com

We're working hard to improve LifeEventNet.com and we're watching your suggestions very carefully for good ideas. Please take a look at what we've been up to lately and come back to check up on us.

Just Launched!
Besides continuing to simplify the user interface in general, including the LifeEventNet.com homepage, we've taken some of the suggestions you've given us to make the 4-step webpage setup process even faster and easier, and still include more features:

• Improved titles and labeling for clarity.
• Fewer clicks to setup your webpage - fewer is better!
  
• A feature to resend invitations, for those folks who didn't get around to reading them.
• A "Copy yourself" feature for sending a copy of any invitation to yourself for later reference.
  
• You can now conveniently assign a co-Organizer or Recipient role to others as part of your invitation step - which gives you a head start in coordinating a Life Event.
• A new look for Update and Reminder emails that includes the Life Event banner and easier to read notices.

What we're working on...

• A new user interface for creating custom Life Event banners, including uploading your custom images.
• Help icons with roll-over messages where you may need them most.
  
• Support for new video players.
• Enhancements to the Activity scheduling features.
• Ability to save and retrieve Personal Notes you add to invitation emails.
• We're compiling references to help you plan and carry out most any Life Event. If you have suggestions, please send them along!
  

Recent Improvements:

• Life Event Homepage Editing for Organizers
  Organizers- Want to change the webpage banner, add Activities to the Volunteer to Help page, or revise the welcome message? You can do these things and more by clicking on the 'Edit' link right on the Life Event Homepage next to the feature you want to edit. The 'Manage this Life Event' link to the Life Event Management page is still on the Take Action panel for many more webpage editing options.
  
  
• Change Indicators
  The idea here is that each time you visit a Life Event homepage, you will be able to quickly see what has changed since your last visit. Updates, email, new photos, whatever, will be marked as new so that you don't have to look through all the various communication features to find the latest information.
  
  
• Update Emails
  With this feature you will receive an email each day that lists what has changed in each of your Life Events since your last login or the last Update email, whichever was most recent. Our intention is to make it easy for you to stay informed about what is going on with all your Life Events. This feature can be turned off in your Preferences settings.
  
  
• Reminder Emails
  This feature will notify you one week and again one day before each of your scheduled commitments. For example, let's say you volunteer to drive an injured friend to physical therapy at 5PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays for 2 months. You will receive an email one week before the first instance of the Date and another 1 day before the first instance. This feature can be turned off in your Preferences settings.