Driving awareness
about the realities
of HIV
www.worldaidsday.org - launch the site
Project overview
There are around 85,000 people in the UK living with HIV, and there remains a lot of fear and misunderstanding of the infection. Few people realise HIV has been reclassified from a terminal illness (as it was in the 80’s and early 90’s), to its status today as a chronic manageable condition.
World AIDS Day is organised and run every December 1st by the National AIDS Trust to raise awareness and understanding of HIV.
Our brief was to create a site that would help the National AIDS Trust raise awareness and understanding of the realities of HIV in the UK today.
What we did
Historically, most visits to the World AIDS Day site happen on December 1st (World AIDS Day itself). We wanted to extend the level of engagement and create a site that provided a reason to engage pre and post-event and a source of changing content that would keep the audience coming back for more.
How to achieve this? We started a conversation.
The conversation encouraged people to talk about the realities of living with HIV and gave individuals a voice to express their experiences. The site became the platform for voices to be heard and stories to be told.
Visitors could not only read real experiences of those living with or affected by HIV, but could also share their own story and speak openly about the challenges they face. To share a story, visitors could either write in, make a film or submit audio to the site.
As well as the user generated content, visitors could download education packs and lesson plans, learn more about the facts and myths surrounding HIV, purchase World AIDS Day merchandise, and access the latest statistics on HIV in the UK.
The Challenges
Although deaths from HIV have dropped dramatically, the number of new HIV infections continues to rise – in 2008 there were 7,298 new infections recorded in the UK. Whilst the outlook today for people living with HIV is better, one thing remains the same – there is still a lot of ignorance and stigma about the reality of living with the virus.
It’s difficult to get people talking openly about HIV – a lot of negative publicity surrounds the issue and more often than not, HIV is seen as something that affects a minority group. The National AIDS Trust wants to reach out to the wider population to tackle the ‘it doesn’t affect me‘ attitude and to show that HIV has an impact on all our lives – affectting everything from employment law to social policy and sexual health education.
SEO and Social media
- Continual SEO to retain No.1 position in search
- Banner adverts for target audiences e.g. Gaydar.co.uk
- Twitter announcements from Stephen Fry
- Facebook campaign content and Twitter updates
- Video content from high-profile politicians on YouTube
- Linking strategy with partner HIV organisations
Results
Increased traffic, increased engagement, increased participation.
With the 2009 World AIDS Day campaign, NAT has managed to reach new audiences and increase visitor numbers. Levels of participation were higher then ever previously seen, with over 250 stories received against an original target of 50.
Stephen Fry, Tweets from World AIDS Day 2009
"People spent more time on the site which is brilliant; and the discussion and buzz was fantastic this year – not just in the HIV sector but also within social spaces."
Katherine Sladden, Marketing Officer, NAT.
"The way we have been able to incorporate real stories into the campaign has been a huge asset, and not something we ever thought we’d be able to do."
Member of The National Aids Trust team.
Gordon Brown, Prime Minister, appears on YouTube for World AIDS Day 2009
With the global trend showing a decrease in interest in HIV related content, the biggest win was visits from social media spaces including; Facebook 7,223 visitors (up 615.86% on 2008); Twitter 2,857 visitors (up +4,825.86% on 2008); Yahoo (mobile) 2,521 (the first time that a mobile community has driven a substantial number of visitors); Gaydar.co.uk 10,172 visitors.