World Refugee Day is June 20. It helps raise awareness to the plight of refugees around the world. USA for UNHCR believed that they needed to do something specific for the American audience. In this day of instant news everywhere, everyone becomes our neighbor, and our faith and/or common decency require us to help our neighbors. After all, most Americans are descendants of economic, political or religious refugees.

NPAdvisors.com registered a specific domain name worldrefugeeday.us and built this site from a design specified by the client. It uses the content management system NPA designed, and it offers some new features that we created for this event, such as the 'Refuge-Ecard'
(http://www.worldrefugeeday.us/Ecard.asp) featuring artwork from the student poster contest. 

In the first few weeks of the site, it has produced hundreds of e-card senders, hundreds of new "Thank You" messages to aid workers, and thousands of dollars in donations. We're also tracking the gifts that are made on the main site that resulted from a link from this site.

NPA also created a special keyword campaign with specific terms and ads to drive traffic to the site. These terms are occupying the coveted top position in Google and the click through rates have averaged 3.7%!

It's an example of a site you could build for a special event or campaign. It can be coordinated with direct mail appeals and other communications to maximize results. It can be done quickly with minimum impact on the main site.

Please view the site carefully - for the ideas it may spark for your organization, and also to help observe World Refugee Day with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

June 2005