This is the 11th part of the personal content section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.
As I wrote a couple of months ago, illness was a staple of the small-town newspaper where I started in this business. It also is an opportunity for the Complete Community Connection.
When someone is hospitalized or at home recovering from an illness or homebound with an extended or terminal illness, we need to give them a web page (or a part of their existing page) to keep people posted on how they’re doing. They could enter their hospital and the page would automatically post visiting hours.
Friends and family members could enter updates after visiting. Distant friends and families (or those not close enough to visit) could enter well wishes. Families wanting to protect the privacy of the ailing family member could make their page password-protected, so they would be updating only their own circle of caring people (this might be a feature offered in lots of the personal-content areas, such as the military or graduation).
Of course, we would offer opportunities to order flowers, balloons, teddy bears, etc. from hospital gift shops, florists, etc. For those hardship cases where people set up donation funds to help with health-care costs, we offer the opportunity to make online contributions. Hospitals and health-care providers might see this as a good place for targeted advertising, too.
In that earlier blog post, I wrote about CaringBridge, a national site already performing the service of keeping family and friends updated about people with illnesses. In other areas where I am discussing personal content, national or global services already exist — Legacy for obituaries, weddingwindow and the knot for weddings, etc. Our approach to those services may vary. In some cases, we might seek a partnership, where we could use the framework already developed and add some value at the community level. In other cases, we might develop a better solution and compete with the national business. We need to be open to both possibilities and seek to develop the best solutions for our communities, rather than locking into a single approach. In our view of competition and partnerships as well as our internal view, we need to remain consistent in separating content from product.
Continue reading the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection with Personal content opportunities: Empty nesters.
The Buttry Diary 
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