In November 2007, the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada approached High Road with a unique challenge: to design and build a bilingual web campaign that would help raise $60m and ensure a cure for multiple sclerosis would be discovered in Canada. Naturally, we accepted the challenge head-on.

To accomplish its mission, the MS Society of Canada needed to be relevant to visitors at various levels of engagement in the fight against MS, and move them up on the “participation ladder”. With this in mind, we tailored the web site to track visitor behaviour and allowed endms.ca to serve up personalized content to everyone from the newly aware to the hyper-engaged.

A campaign blog allowed potential donors insight into the workings of the campaign while a multitude of RSS feeds allowed users to subscribe to all updates: from new events to blog postings and from video updates to new funding.

endMS.ca also showed off  our creative team at their best – they developed a Flash “funding simulator” that demonstrated how donations change the face of MS research in Canada. The team also created an emotionally-stirring cut of the campaign PSA, subtly introducing colour into the black and white video to enhance the site’s overall design and aesthetics.

Using an integrated multi-channel solution that incorporated online editorial outreach, online advertising and community-based marketing, we recommended a truly integrated approach and helped the MS Society pursue their funding goal.

 

As a pilot project, High Road developed an internal micro-site focused on the topic of Sustainability – a core corporate commitment by Sun Life to its shareholders, customers and employees.  The micro-site let employees share ideas around sustainability initiatives, large and small, that could be implemented within their home or office environment. Employees were then able to rate and comment on suggestions.

As part of the pilot, High Road developed Sun Life’s policies on participation and engagement using social media tools.  These policies enabled Sun Life to proceed with open and un-moderated posting of content.  Within the first three days of launch, Sun Life received more than 900 posts, 4,500 votes and 1,200 comments.

Building on the success of the pilot project, High Road then moved to transform the corporate communications platform within The Source, Sun Life’s corporate intranet.  All news stories and articles are now published directly on the intranet and grouped by geography and topic.  Employees can rate, comment and tag these articles and regular columns have been introduced, such as “Leaders Talk”, to encourage dialogue with management and to help communicate across the organization.