Redesigning Missionary Outreach Support Services: An integration of web-based technology

Missionary Outreach Support Services (MOSS) was designed to meet the unique mental health needs of the missionary community. In its original form, MOSS was predominantly e-consultative in nature. Since its inception, few missionaries have utilized the services provided despite the perceived great need. Member care experts who made recommendations for change that could potentially increase its use by missionaries evaluated the program and suggested that a strong in-group identity and hesitancy by this group to seek help from outside the community led to MOSS's underutilization. The aim of this project was to implement the recommendations made by the member care experts and to redesign MOSS in such a way as to increase its use by the target population. One of the main components of the redesign was to move away from an e-consultative model, to a more user-driven, online community platform in which missionaries can seek help and support from other missionaries. Member care experts and missionaries were interviewed and asked to evaluate the redesigned site in a semistructured interview. Content analysis was utilized to analyze their responses for program refinement.