BrightStar's BrightInsights

CareTogether: How to Invite Family and Friends to Your Care Team Using Google Contacts

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BrightStar Care® built CareTogether™ as a free support tool for family caregivers. It’s a private, secure, one-stop destination where family members and friends who take care of a loved one can manage care by keeping track of appointments, sharing photos, accessing condition-specific resources, and more. Caregiving can be physically and emotionally draining. CareTogether helps caregivers involve family and friends in the day-to-day demands of tending to the needs of ailing or aging loved ones.

In these blog posts, we’ll highlight specific CareTogether features, we’ll share stories of how people use CareTogether, and give you all the information you need to make the most of your CareTogether experience.

For today, we’ll focus on how to build your CareTogether team by syncing with your Gmail account. Unlike any other online care coordination system, CareTogether syncs with Outlook, Gmail, and Facebook, so you can quickly and easily assemble your team with your closest friends and family through programs you use every day.

To invite family and friends to your team and community through Google, start by clicking on the green “Send an Invite” button under the “Team” Tab.

If you already know the email addresses of family members, you can enter them in the field “Enter an Email address.” Simply hit the space bar to add another email address. If you see a mistake in the email address you enter, hit the “X” that appears next to it and reenter it.

If you can’t remember email addresses (who can?), then import your Gmail contacts.

To import your Gmail contacts:

1. Click the Team tab
2. Click the Gmail icon in the
3. Grant CareTogether Access to your Google contacts and calendar. In addition to syncing with your Google contacts, granting permission in this step also will let you export calendar events to your Google Calendar…but we’ll cover that feature in a later blog post.
   
   
   
   
4. Select the contacts you want to invite to the CareTogether Page
5. Click “Save”
6. Designate if you’d like these people to be part of the Care Team or the Care Community.
1. Think of the Care Team as the core group of decision makers and active members of the caregiving process. Team members have access to the calendar, task lists, and journaling features.
2. Community members do not have access to the calendar and task lists. They can read journal entries and comment on them, but they can’t post them.
7. Enter a Personal Message explaining how you intend to use CareTogether.
8. Click the green “Send Invite” button
9. Contacts will receive an email from support@care-together.comwith the subject line: “[Your name] has invited you to CareTogether.”
1. We recommend contacting your friends or family members through a phone call, text, or personal email message to let them know to expect the invite to CareTogether. If they don’t know you’re using CareTogether, they may not know that it’s a trusted message.
10. People you invite will have to register with CareTogether, and the invitation email explains how to do that.

And that’s how you invite family and friends to CareTogether through Gmail! In future blog posts, we’ll cover how to invite people to CareTogether using Outlook and Facebook.

We’re eager to your feedback about the program, so please don’t hesitate to leave questions or suggestions in the comments below.