Global Pandemic Landing Page

What's the story?

The Global Pandemic Landing Page told the story of the COVID-19 pandemic from the point of view of reliable sources - a story that had early on been distorted and derailed by a flood of misinformation on social and in some cases traditional media.

What does the story do?

As the catastrophe unfolded, the need for a reliable narrative became literally a matter of life and death. The challenge was to provide comprehensive, verifiable and an up-to-date narrative on the ongoing global pandemic to counter the "infodemic" of false information on the web that was putting lives at risk.

We began with a basic story of "What happens next?" The story evolved on a daily basis as new elements appeared. Our web team worked with health program specialists and a partner agency (3 Media Web) to create the content and then bring it to life in an interactive, visually engaging way.

Who is the audience?

The page had to serve a broad audience - 1. health care professionals 2. general audience 3. skeptics and the curious

What form should it take?

This landing page needed to be interactive so that it immediately engaged visitors with choices, motion and viewing options from the first arrival to the scroll to accessible, valuable resources, reliable news updates, visualized statistics, individual stories, videos/images and expert health guidelines to keep individuals informed and safe during three deadly years.

Trust in the reliability of the content came from the use of multiple information sources. For example, the daily health statistics came from Johns Hopkins, CDC and an aggregator website built by a young data prodigy who sourced it from multiple reporting entities and built a data reporting tool that gave considerable, searchable detail, seasoned by several identified and verifiable organizations. We never relied on one source alone. And as medical knowledge of the virus and its possible treatments and preventative measures expanded, we added the new and changing perspectives, always with a clear reference to the source. A sample feature was "Unmask the Facts" from the CDC.

In order to encourage returns to the page, updates occurred nearly every day. The updates included new data, the latest news on the Pandemic and important information on preventive measures and vaccine progress. The primary goal of the page was to provide real value to help visitors navigate a world unlike anything they had ever experienced. It served as an honest broker of evolving information - a reliable storyteller.

Result:

For more than two years, the page almost always had the most visits each week on the website and the longest average time on page. In those months, more than 300,000 people visited the page and the time on page often averaged 10 minutes or more. It allowed us to take advantage of free online ads promoting the content which not only added to the site visit numbers but helped reinforce brand identity of the organization as a trusted resource.

The page did not feature any ask or major promotion for the work of the organization. Instead it offered free, reliable information and insight. Even the fly-in promoted more information. This not only built trust in the information itself but in the organization that was providing and promoting it.