As the world unites in celebration of the first Nelson Mandela International Day (18 July) since the great icon’s death, Flow Communications has relaunched the website www.mandeladay.com, which pays homage to Madiba, celebrates his legacy and encourages the world to live by his values – today and every day.
Flow has worked with the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) since 2007, providing communications assistance across its digital and print platforms. Recently, after a pitch process, Flow was re-awarded the digital work it undertakes for the NMF, which included the relaunch of the prestigious Mandela Day website.
“Flow Communications boldly took on this mammoth challenge for the Foundation in a short period to honour our late founder and to assist us in living his legacy every day. Partners such as these aid us in making the mandate left to us by Madiba a reality,” says Danielle Melville, director of communications and outreach at the NMF.
The revamped Mandeladay.com has become Flow’s flagship site. With bold, fluid visuals, engaging, informative content, and a groundbreaking, responsive design, it is a site that Flow is confident of benchmarking against some of South Africa’s most innovative and technically advanced sites.
“Being part of this project has been a deeply humbling experience,” says Flow managing director Tiffany Turkington-Palmer. “We wanted to create a platform that would enable both a local and international audience to engage with Mandela’s ethics, and to engage with one another as they share their experiences this Mandela Day. We consider this opportunity a great honour.”
Says Richard Frank, head of Flow’s web development team, “The Mandela Day website is written in the common PHP MySQL coding language and makes use of the publishing platform ExpressionEngine 2. Its responsive design means that it scales according to the device on which you are viewing it.
“A number of technical features have also been incorporated to make it both user-friendly and innovative, including a geolocation search, which allows you to enter your current location and find events close to you, and a social wall that feeds in social activity from various platforms using the #MandelaDay and #Time2Serve hashtags. The ‘Take action’ page features lazy loading, which means that more information is loaded the further down you scroll, meaning you don’t have to reload the page.”
Ideas on how to take action on Mandela Day are just one component of the site. Historical context on the day is also available, and the site’s resource centre provides practical Mandela Day tools for businesses, the media and educators. These toolkits include background information on Mandela’s life, Mandela Day artwork, videos and infographics, and authorised quotes, email signature options and template pages.
Inspirational videos from changemakers all over the world are also available, including interviews with Nelson Mandela’s grandson and chief of the Mvezo Traditional Council, Mandla Mandela, and one of South Africa’s most esteemed entrepreneurs and the founder of Nando’s, Robert Brozin. The site also features videos of endorsement from Will Smith, Richard Branson, Brad Pitt, Bono and former United States president Bill Clinton.
“The exceptional communications team at the NMF that has partnered with us in putting this together has embraced innovation and technical advances,” says Turkington-Palmer, “using them to spread the legacy of Mandela and to encourage others to do the same. Flow is so very proud to have been a part of this process.”
The message at the heart of Mandela Day is simple: Take action. Inspire change. The Mandela Day website is the conduit for the latter, but the responsibility for both is up to all of us.
