First Aid Hero Shortlisted for European Search Awards

There’s no shortage of information online about first aid: a quick Google search turns up 610 million results. Unfortunately, a medical emergency is the one situation when Googling just isn’t quick enough. To save lives, we need to learn what to do ahead of time and somehow recall it in the adrenalin rush of the moment.

simpleshow’s free 10-minute interactive course on “How to Become a First Aid Hero”, produced last spring in collaboration with the German Red Cross, educates would-be rescuers without drowning them in the details.

Instead, it tells stories about entertaining characters – from Baldini, the sword-wielding stage magician, to Amir, the romantically clumsy ice-skater – and makes the dead-serious material fun to learn. In a crowded field of emergency instructions, our clarity turned heads: 40,000 of them.

Impressed, this year’s European Search Awards, which honour European businesses for their content marketing, have now shortlisted simpleshow’s First Aid Hero out of hundreds of applicants. The Awards, launched in 2012 by the media-savvy events agency Don’t Panic, are judged by a panel of 25 Internet luminaries including Jose Truchado, Director of SEO at Expedia. simpleshow will be contending in the “Innovation” category.

For us, designing the course was a learning experience of our own. We knew that a multimedia course would be a great way to drive traffic to the website. But unlike with our classic explainer videos, length was an issue. We were determined to give decent visibility to each of the four main messages. Ideally, that meant one clip each. But how could we hold onto the notoriously short attention spans of today’s viewers?

With strong storytelling, as always. The micro-learning unit opens with an intro video starring Tom, a young comic-book fan who wishes he could become a superhero. His dad explains that he can – no super-powers needed – and sums up the essentials of first aid. The adorable little boy won over our viewers and kept them clicking through the next four illustrated episodes and accompanying quizzes. The average visitor stuck around for 7 minutes, or about an eon by Internet standards. It’s nice to be recognised for hard work.

Our first aid hero has already received a Lovie Award for his bravery and was a finalist for the 2014 European E-Learning Award. We’d be thrilled to take home another prize from Reykjavik. But we shouldn’t let it get to our heads: the real satisfaction is knowing that if one of those thousands of viewers is ever faced with an emergency, they’ll remember how to save the day.

All the best from your simpleshow team
(Jake)