How do you put a younger face on Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), build awareness about COPD among Canadians aged 40 and over, and leverage the momentum started a year earlier with a microsite?

In 2008, The Canadian Lung Association launched the Coast2CoastChallenge – a static microsite under the TeamCOPD.ca domain (EquipeMPOC.ca in French) to help build awareness for COPD, while leading up to World COPD Day in November. The Canadian Lung Association wanted to emphasize the younger face of COPD and integrate social media into the 2009 campaign.

The challenge was to take the static microsite and create a dynamic online community hub that would launch in time to build awareness for World COPD Day while providing a place for people with COPD (“COPDers”) and their supporters to interact all year round while building on the momentum of the previous year.

High Road Communications’ digital team worked closely with The Canadian Lung Association to define an integrated strategic approach that would continue to raise awareness about COPD and the need for early diagnosis; highlight the younger face of COPD; drive high-risk Canadians to talk to their doctors about COPD, risk factors and screening; and, position The Canadian Lung Association as an authority on COPD information and support. From a digital perspective, we needed to develop a program that could be sustained by The Canadian Lung Association after World COPD Day.

In 2008, whenever participants engaged in physical activity it was tracked and updated manually by revising a graphic of a map housed on the microsite displaying how many kilometers they had trekked across Canada. In 2009, the microsite was renamed TeamCOPD (EquipeMPOC in French) to reflect an ongoing program and align with the domain name. The Coast 2 Coast Challenge became a feature of the site but not the main focus.

There were several other enhancements. Specific to the Coast 2 Coast challenge, the date and kilometers trekked were tallied in real-time without having to change the graphic. Three social media extensions were added – Twitter, YouTube and Flickr – whereby members of the community were able to share their stories, videos and photos, and see them appear in real time on the TeamCOPD.ca home page and throughout the microsite. Although the social media extensions launched with content related to the challenge, they were poised to last all year round. The COPD Quiz – a sharable widget – was developed allowing people to take a short COPD quiz that provided feedback and totaled their scores. At the end of the quiz, people were invited to visit lung.ca to learn more about COPD and get help. They also were able display the quiz on their own blogs and websites.

As a result of this initiative, a significant amount of activity emerged during the month leading up to World COPD Day and The Canadian Lung Association is poised to carry on nurturing the TeamCOPD.ca community:

• TeamCOPD.ca visits increased by 176% in 2009 over 2008, and drove about 25% of that traffic to lung.ca.
• COPD Quiz widget was viewed more than 4,600 times.
• 29 videos were uploaded to TeamCOPD’s and EquipeMPOC’s YouTube channels
• And most significantly, online activity helped drive offline results: 54,720 km were trekked by the COPD community up from 41,621 km or a 31% increase over 2008.