With five Australians under 40 diagnosed with Parkinson’s every day , Parkinson’s NSW has launched the first-ever ‘No Escape Room’ to simulate what life is like for people living with the disease.
Everything started with a Facebook Ads Campaign
This campaign started with a callout via Facebook to Australia’s biggest escape room enthusiasts, with the opportunity to be the first people to trial a new escape room. What the participants didn’t know was that they were taking part in an experiment to dramatise the everyday challenges of people living with Parkinson’s.
Taking three days to construct, including building multiple hidden cameras into the structure, the room was designed to help participants understand Parkinson’s symptoms through a series of puzzles inspired by everyday tasks such as tying a shoelace, pouring tea and using a computer mouse. Each one was rigged to simulate how Parkinson’s symptoms – such as loss of memory, physical tremors, stiffness, confusion, difficulty multi-tasking and blurred vision – impact a person’s ability to complete everyday movements and tasks.
Integrating the escape room into their Digital Strategy
In order to integrate this offline effort to the digital strategy, the campaign is brought to life with an interactive digital version of the No Escape Room and a related online video, together allowing more people (and people from different countries) to experience the daily challenges faced by people with Parkinson’s and help to shift the common misconception that it is a disease of the elderly. The next step of this process was the creation of a site (https://noescaperoom.com.au/) that simulates the feeling of being inside the escape room via a 360 experience, with each challenge replicated for the users to attempt.
The campaign is a good example of how just developing a website, your nonprofit can integrate every effort into a solid digital strategy that allows the organisation to get more visibility around potential supporters all over the world.
This one-of-a-kind experience, was created by Wunderman Thompson Australia and Airbag.
