The Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF) recently teamed up with High Road to refresh its online presence – and the result is more than just a new coat of paint.  With the launch of this new site, CHSRF will be talking to its audience about what matters most: the state of Canada’s healthcare system.

The CHSRF’s mandate is to strengthen healthcare in Canada by engaging and supporting citizens, accelerating evidence-informed change, and promoting policy dialogue.  With the new CHSRF.ca, the independent, not-for-profit group has become a great example of how organizations can take advantage of online tools to better engage stakeholders and foster a strong sense of community in its audience to truly drive change.

Developed with the goal of encouraging national dialogue and debate between health services partners, academia, media and researchers, the rebranded site is the product of extensive stakeholder consultations and a social media audit.

CHSRF.ca  invites visitors to join in on the healthcare conversation through both Facebook and Twitter, and visitors can also contribute to and stay up to date with CHSRF through the community page, which features recent news and health updates,  as well as a Twitter feed from CHSRF’s customized community list.

Visitors can also easily view CHSRF’s extensive content library through a robust tagging system (including tag clouds) which allow visitors to quickly access the exact information they need. This was made possible through the implementation of a more flexible, customizable content management system (CMS).

The new CHSRF site will now be a thriving online hub to connect healthcare thinkers with healthcare doers – a space that is sure to contribute to the ongoing development of the Canadian healthcare system.

For the three years, High Road supported the Canadian Securities Administrators’ effort to teach youth about the importance of saving and investing through the Financial Fitness Challenge.

The bilingual www.financialfitnesschallenge.ca serves as the contest hub, delivering personalized content to youth, teachers and parents, through interactive Flash-based games, a quiz, and downloadable school and at-home financial resources. The 2009 campaign saw  High Road reaching audiences in new ways – from Facebook networking and advertising to media relations to email marketing campaigns and online editorial outreach to parents and homeschool teachers.

The strategy in 2009 was driven in large part by the success of the 2008 Facebook group, and the desire to further tailor the program’s outreach to appeal to the youth audience, and more importantly, their channels of influence. To accomplish this, the teacher’s resource centre was given more prominence and was altered to engage parents and homeschoolers. We  then launched an extensive outreach campaign, which enabled the CSA and High Road to develop personal relationships with the Canadian mommy and homeschooling blogger community.

The use of Facebook proved to be a very successful tactic again in 2009. Four targeted, paid Facebook Ads, generated click-throughs to the site and the newly developed English and French Facebook fan pages. By adding fan pages, High Road could customize the content to reflect the design and interaction already existing on the website. Each week, the CSA would post new questions for fans relating to money and financing. When the contest closed, the two Facebook pages generated several discussion posts offering advice to others and personalized stories about budgeting, saving and investing.

Beyond Facebook, email campaigns have proven very successful over the past three years. In 2009, High Road reached out to over 50,000 youth via email, resulting in over 9,000 click-throughs to the English and French sites. Once on the site, over 13,700 Canadian youth took the quiz and completed a survey which revealed some of their thoughts on the program and finances.

 

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.