The Association for the Assistance of Children with Deficiency (AACD) is a Brazilian non-profit organization that offers free, quality treatment for children and adults with physical and mental illnesses or injuries. It's a traditional, reputable, decades-old institution with thousands of patients in centres scattered around eight states.AACD needed a new website to replace its original one, perceived by the client as cold and text-heavy. It was an opportunity to build an innovative web presence, one that could give visibility to the institution's inner collaboration environment - and at the same time enhance that very environment by connecting patients, families, doctors and volunteers from all AACD units. We wanted to increase the exchange of experiences and information between doctors, experienced patients and other people, often in poor neighbourhoods or small towns, who sometimes don't know that AACD can treat them for free using cutting-edge medical technology. We developed a new website based on a social network platform. Many sections of the former site were reinterpreted as discussion groups, forum topics and profile pages. The word was spread through the natural network of staff, volunteers and patients, and the site’s population topped its first thousand before the rollout.

AACD's new website was built on the Ning social network platform. In order to accommodate all the institutional information that the client needed, a vast amount of customization was required. And that applied not only to page layouts and programming, but also to the content itself. Most of what was then static, cold informative text was "translated" to fit a collaborative model. Entire sections became discussion groups, with their content rewritten as forum topics – simpler, shorter, and easier to read and open to comments and questions from the community. All members have their own profile page, with personal data, photo and video galleries, a message box and a blog. The same goes for AACD itself. Its "personal" profile page can be added by other members as a friend, and is just as open to conversation as anyone using the network. It also includes more information on the entity and a blog featuring news, articles and selected posts from members' personal pages.

The new AACD website was the first website of a Brazilian non-profit organization built under a social network model. By the time of its official release, on March 30th 2009, the news about AACD's brand new community website was already spreading across the entity's natural network of people. We were surprised to see that it had already 1,200 active members from all over Brazil even before it was rolled out. The AACD social network has now about 2,290 members. They use the discussion groups and forum topics to find valuable information for their children or themselves, often talking to doctors who also participate. Members shape their own contact networks, getting to know and finding support in people who fight against the same conditions in their local communities or elsewhere in the country. People who fight them in many ways, under many roles – either as patients, doctors, donors, or volunteers.