One thing many people have realized during the COVID pandemic is that keeping in touch with family and nurturing family bonds is a priority value, regardless of our age and generation. Social media platforms and apps have given us unprecedented opportunity to check in on loved ones and stay in touch, but they’ve also raised more than a few alarm bells. Especially for families with children.

While the pervasiveness of social media in this digital age can be a valuable tool for connecting, networking, and sharing thoughts, ideas, and accomplishments, it can also present significant concerns for parents and grandparents wishing to protect kids and minimize their exposure on social media.

And many are struggling to find the balance between using the powerful force of social networking to nurture and improve family connections and for engaging with family groups to keep memories, traditions, and relationships alive. 

From sharing a video of baby’s first steps or posting photos of the kids at the beach, to swapping family recipes in a group message or working together to build a family tree, people increasingly want to spend more time regularly interacting with family over social media. 

Yet while almost everyone has a family of some kind—in some cases, it may be a very close group of friends—there can be significant hurdles to getting everybody onboard and consistently using a common social media platform.

Break the Barriers to Family Social Networking

Here are just a few barriers parents and family groups face around signing up for a social networking app:

• Reluctance to share significant life events to everyone on the friends list, which typically includes distant friends and colleagues.
• Privacy and safety concerns, especially around sharing photos and information about children.
• Overabundance of targeted ads, behavior tracking, data mining, and clickbait.
• Potential for identity theft and fraud.
• Political opinions that might trigger disagreements.
• Inappropriate and even demeaning comments from insensitive friends.
• Links to non-child friendly features, such as dating apps and obsessive games.
• Future repercussions, especially for younger family members, around old photos being accessible years later.

One of the great things about Kinscape is that it removes all these barriers and others, by offering a safe, private, easy-to-use social media platform with a rich set of features designed with families in mind. Privacy and safety are at the heart of all we do and central to our design philosophy.

Kinscape Provides a Safe Private Social Network for Family

Kinscape makes it easy for you to build your own secure online family communities without privacy concerns because you always have full control of your data and who can see it. It creates a space for you to manage your family networks, add or remove members, share important events and keep all members in the loop on family activities. 

Here’s how easy it is to sign up for Kinscape, build a family community, and start sharing:

Step One

Sign up for our free beta trial and create your private profile to get started. One of the great features of Kinscape is that you can create multiple profiles for each Community you build or join. That way, you’re always putting your best face forward, whatever group you’re in.

Step Two

Start a Community. You’ll see multiple options for Family, Club, Team, and more. Choose Family, give it a name, and upload a cover photo to make it easy for other family members to recognize.

You might want to consider creating family communities for different sets of family members, for instance, cousins, siblings, the wife’s side of the family, the husband’s side of the family, the generation of grandparents and great aunts and uncles. That lets you decide what information you share out to each group and avoid oversharing to those who may be less interested.

Step Three

Invite your family members. If they’re already in Kinscape and you’re connected, they’ll pop up as an option. Otherwise, simply enter their email address and we’ll shoot them an email with easy-to-follow instructions. As Admin of the family Community, you also control whether they can comment and add their own Stories to share with the group. And you can also add an Offline Member for fun—your dog Bella or cat Daisy.

Step Four

Start building Stories to share with your private family community. Stories can take many forms, such as photo albums, videos, voice recordings, written chapters and a combination of everything. They can also be as long or as short as you like and you can decide which members of your family can contribute and comment.

Step Five

Share your Stories to your private family Community. In one easy step, you share your Story to your group to enjoy and contribute, depending on the permissions you give them. If they’re a member of your Community, they can also add their own stories (with your permission).

A Secure Family-Focused Social Network

Unlike Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other ad-based social media platforms, Kinscape offers a completely ad-free environment with the promise that we’ll never share your data or track your behavior to profit off your desire to connect with family and friends. 

For a small annual fee, also payable monthly, you get a simple and safe way to share those precious memories and delightful moments without worrying about social pressures, voyeurism, and exploitative tracking. You can also sponsor other members’ memberships, so if it’s difficult for great aunt Nancy to do online payments, you can take care of it for her.

Kinscape is designed from the ground up to support multiple communities that cater to each aspect of your life, giving you control over who sees your content and who belongs to the communities you establish. You decide whether to join a Community, too, and always stay in control of your own personal data and digital footprint.

An Alternative to Ad-Based Social Media Networks

For parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins, Kinscape makes social media family sharing easy and fun with an alternative, protected space to share family information and photos. Think of it as a private safe haven where you can keep your family members updated on everything from daily news to major milestones. 

Here are some of the features that differentiate Kinscape from Facebook, Instagram, and similar ad-based platforms:

• No ads, clickbait, or data selling.
• Control over who can comment and provide feedback
• The ability to add offline members, such as a deceased relative or pet dog.
• Unlimited number of Communities per account for every aspect of your life.
• Support for multiple member profiles that lets you choose a different photo and nickname for each of your Communities.
• Rich storytelling/scrapbooking features.
• Easy access to the profiles of your connections in each Community.
• Messaging tool for individual or family contacts.

More importantly, are the many things you can do in Kinscape to help your family stay in touch, nurture the bonds and strengthen the ties you share. Here are just a few ideas:

• Use the Story feature to create a photo album for a family wedding, baptism, anniversary, birthday, or other celebration and invite family members to post their own photos from the event. You can create a chapter for the formal photographers’ photos, and add more chapters either by contributor, people in the photo, or time of day. Gathering all the photos in this way makes a wonderful keepsake, and you can always download digital copies at any time to be made into prints.
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• Start a family recipe book using the Story feature and let all family members contribute. Each recipe can be a chapter and include photos and comments from both cooks and tasters. There may also be a back story to some recipes that can be documented and shared by those who remember it, adding more color and flavor to this popular tradition.

• Build a family tree within a Story and share it across the family so people can add more ancestors and something about themselves, if they choose. This tradition used to be passed down through old family bibles, but these would fade, get lost, and disappear over time. Now Kinscape makes it possible to do it electronically and store it safely for future generations to come.

• Write your own memoir or story and share it when you’re ready. There are many success stories of writers going viral (and even picking up publishing contracts) after self-publishing their stories. Kinscape makes it easy to write a story and then give your communities access to read it. You can also choose to allow them to provide feedback. While you may not become a published author, your family will love to read stories about your youth and experiences with past generations. And with Kinscape, your story and photographs, videos, and voice recordings, can be saved for generations to come. 

At the end of the day, most people really don’t want everything they do or every photo they take to be broadcast across social media and visible to strangers, but they do want to share precious, private moments with family and the people who matter most. Kinscape lets that happen.

Sign up for Kinscape today and invite your family members to join you.