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Assessing the need for online
support

by Jennifer Kelly 26 March 2008

Should you consider an online support service?

Many charities provide support and information to a specific target audience, which could include both their service users and also their service user’s wider community of family and friends.

When considering how having an online support service might benefit your organisation consider the following questions:

1. Does your organisation offer information or support?
2. Does your organisation offer face-to-face support services?
3. Is your target audience widely dispersed?
4. Do you have difficulties in making your services available on a national level?
5. Do you have difficulty in reaching people in remote areas?
6. Do people find it difficult to travel to your support groups or meetings?
7. Do you find that your support workers resources are strained?
8. Do you have support workers or personnel that travel to visit your service users?
9. Do you deal with sensitive issues?
10. Are anonymity and confidentiality an important element in the service you offer?
11. Do you have difficulty in recruiting support staff and / or volunteers?
12. Is the cost of setting-up, developing and managing face-to-face support services prohibited for your organisation?
13. Is it easier for your organisation to access capital funding?
14. Would you like to run support groups but don't have the resources for face to face support services?
15. Would you like to be able to host real-time question and answer sessions?

If your answers to the above questions are mainly yes’s then you should consider an online support service.

The development and set-up logistics are practically none, your organisation is left to simply promote the online service among its service users.

Its very cost effective. You don’t need to hire a large number of staff. In fact at a minimum you could get away with one part-time resource, depending on the scale of the services you want to offer.

Obviously, if you want to run three or more supervised online support meetings a week and anticipate large numbers per session, you will need to consider resources. You may need to think about training more volunteers or staff to facilitate the meetings.

If training more volunteers isn’t an option for your organisation right now, then you can set your online support services to an appropriate level. The point is, the technology is there to make the right level of support services available to you.

Having an online support group is like having a permanent meeting venue, which is accessible to your users to communicate in real-time no matter where they’re located. It’s safe, as anonymous as you want it to be, confidential and very secure. It’s applicable to a wide variety of uses, including support groups, question and answer sessions with experts, organisation meetings, discussion groups or even board meetings.

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