Creating An Effective, Engaging Brand and Website of Resources to Help Older Adults and Their Caregivers in Tough Times
The Challenge
Public health emergencies—including disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, natural disasters and severe weather—can disproportionately affect older adults, particularly those with complex needs.
When disaster strikes, community-serving organizations provide a wide range of services and support for older adults. They play a valuable role in helping older adults and their caregivers prepare for emergencies and get the services and supports they need to recover.
While hundreds of organizations have created thousands of resources in a variety of formats to help these community-serving organizations during these times, nothing synthesized all of these resources into one easy-to-use repository of resources and programs.
Our Approach
The CDC Foundation, with technical assistance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), funded NORC at the University of Chicago to study the needs and concerns of older adults and their caregivers during public health emergencies. That team also surveyed all available resources for older adults and caregivers during a public health emergency, creating clear and helpful categorizations of the available resources and detailing the most compelling, helpful and up-to-date resources.
Burness partnered with NORC’s research team to develop the name, brand identity, website strategy and design and communications approach to host approximately 300 programs and resources identified in the research work.
As the lead creative and messaging strategists for the project, Burness named the website Search. Find. Help. as a nod to the journey community-serving organizations take when using the set of resources.
We created a brand and website that has a fresh approach to a compilation of resources and seeks to drive engagement and uptake of the resources with inviting and accessible design and content, helpful features for filtering and saving resources, and complementary detail pages that illustrate how to use the resources and other efforts from the program. We also developed an explainer video to help users understand the value of Search. Find. Help. and the features of the website.
Search. Find. Help. now works every day to assist organizational leaders and staff in finding resources they can use to support older adults and caregivers during public health emergencies. These resources include interventions, policies, programs and strategies addressing social isolation, managing chronic conditions, elder abuse and neglect, caregiver support, delayed medical care and emergency preparedness.
Results + Impact
Since its launch in June 2021, the website has been used by more than 34,000 people. Visitors view more than four pages per visit, on average, and the website has been featured by national organizations as a helpful tool for community-serving organizations across the country.
The Burness team manages ongoing paid advertising efforts to get the website in front of relevant audiences. We also provide monthly website analytics reporting, which includes thoughtful learning and recommendations for ongoing improvements and enhancements to the website and communications work based on the performance data.