World Health Organization

Launching the WHO's First AR Course Worldwide

First marketing hire at an EdTech startup inside the World Health Organization. I wrote the go-to-market strategy for its first augmented reality course, built with Meta Reality Labs, and led the global rollout. It reached health workers in 150 countries, across seven languages.

Video © World Health Organization. Produced by Nexus Studios with Meta Reality Labs.

Case study 01

My role

Digital Marketing Consultant

Organisation

WHO Academy: an EdTech startup built inside the World Health Organization.

Industry

HealthTech · EdTech · Global Health

Skills demonstrated

Marketing Growth Partnerships Production Localisation

Overview

The challenge

Health workers everywhere needed to learn how to put on and take off PPE safely. The WHO built an augmented reality course to teach them. Getting it to them was my job.

What I owned

Distribution Localisation, 7 languages Go-to-market strategy Analytics & Tracking Content production App Store Optimisation Stakeholder management Vendor management

Explore the story

01 · The Challenge

Launch a global product with almost no channels of our own.

A health worker points a phone at an augmented reality clinician demonstrating hand hygiene

Who were we trying to reach?: Healthcare workers, everywhere.
What did that demand?: A worldwide launch in seven languages.
What did we have?: A team of two, and one mailing list. Everything else ran through other departments.

Context

We were a new division launching a sub-brand inside a hierarchical, highly regulated organisation, and we were disrupting the established ways of working. That, understandably, made people uncomfortable, and buy-in for this internal startup varied across the organisation. We were not allowed channels or a website of our own, so every route to an audience ran through someone else, and trust had to be won by building relationships. Those relationships ultimately became the campaign's greatest growth lever.

02 · The Strategy

My first assignment was the go-to-market strategy.

On arrival, I was asked to write the go-to-market strategy. I documented target personas, designed a multichannel distribution plan, and defined the metrics we would track. Once approved, it was presented to our partners at Meta and Nexus Studios, and shared across the Academy.

03 · First Principles

In reality, we couldn't run the launch we'd planned.

The WHO's main social channels ran through a central communications team that works like an in-house agency for the whole organisation. We were one internal client with a limited number of posts we did not control, so we could never run the sustained launch we would have run on our own channels: no content calendar, no control over timing, no room to tell the story over time.

The reframe

So I went back to basics.

Who already had the attention of the people we needed to reach?

The most direct route was not a channel at all. It was the people those health workers already trusted, and the WHO Academy and the wider organisation were full of them, each a direct line to the audience we needed.

So I rebuilt the approach around sharing, equipping well-connected people and trusted organisations with ready-made content, built for them to share with their own networks.

04 · The Solution

We launched across many channels, and built a kit for others to share.

We rolled out more than a dozen touchpoints, one by one, because the team was tiny. At the centre sat a kit that let colleagues, partners and associations carry the message for us: posters, posts, emails, tiles and reels, localised and ready to share.

What ran

Explore the social media toolkit

133 ready-made assets, sized for the platform, in seven languages. A colleague or partner could open the folder and post in seconds.

05 · Results

Reached users in 150 countries within three months

Despite the constraints, the campaign reached health workers across the world.

The social media toolkit

Nineteen assets. Seven languages. Published for staff and partner organisations to distribute.

Live link

Selected to exhibit at the Paris Peace Forum, 2020.

The project was submitted and chosen. I was due to present in Paris until travel shut down.

Live link

Next case study

This was zero to one. Next: building it to scale.

The Engine Behind 36 Course Launches

I was promoted and tasked with making one launch repeatable. I built the WHO Academy's first content-operations system, then hired and trained the team to run it without me.

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