Since it was first established, SDU's target group was limited to university graduates. The government justified this elitist approach by announcing that they had identified graduates—and in particular the females among them—as a group which required assistance in terms of finding lifelong partners. According to the government, non-graduates did not seem to have any difficulty in finding partners. However, the Social Development Service (SDS) was set up a year after the SDU to promote marriages among non-graduates. On 28 January 2009, the SDU and SDS merged to become a single entity, tentatively named SDU-SDS, consolidating their respective resources and exposing their constituent members to the larger, merged database. It was renamed as Social Development Network or SDN on 16 October 2009.