Making a difference during the COVID-19 pandemic? Share how. Plus some ideas from us.

Being a forum that helps teach we knew the virus was going to be a topic on our site. Rather than sit back and wait for the questions, we went ahead and started preparing content to help our users understand how this played with our niche. We wrote a WIKI article by a former MIT student and backed some of the comments up with solid references from the CDC. Once completed we went ahead and emailed it out to our users who responded with overwhelming support. This email saw about a 30% open rate and a roughly 7% click through rate. Since this email our WIKI has climbed to the top ten for some Coronavirus queries and is one of our most popular topics as many of our users are worried about the virus.

Our niche revolves around killing things.......viruses, bacteria, algae.......we hate all of it. Often we turn to chlorine to kill as it's VERY effective and cheap. Over the last week we've seen our normal sources of chlorine disappear from the shelves as people start to catch on to our tricks. To help our users find various sources of chlorine we've also setup a map where users can submit their finds for others to benefit from. This map is still in it's VERY VERY early stages, but it's something we hope to see improve in the near future.
 
I actually built a new forum a few weeks back just in case things got worse ...and they have.


It still only has a few signups but we just put it live on March 9, 2020 without any advertising, just some social media sharing to this point.

We thought it could be useful as a central outlet for people to express their thoughts and feelings on everything they are experiencing during the pandemic. Whether it's talking about it or putting it into words and sharing it, it will all help with the mental health aspect during this current crisis.

We also added the ability to post classifieds (thanks to @Stuart Wright for producing a the prefix essentials add-on allowing that to be possible) for people in need of items, or that have something for sale/trade that could be useful to someone else in their community during this time.

The site is pretty basic at this point but I think if people eventually find it, some will find it useful. If it just helps a few people through this time then in my mind it's money and time well spent.

Feel free to post or message me additional suggestions or feedback on the site.
 
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This email saw about a 30% open rate and a roughly 7% click through rate. Since this email our WIKI has climbed to the top ten for some Coronavirus queries and is one of our most popular topics as many r niche revolves around killing things.......viruses, bacteria, algae.......we hate all of it. Often we turn to chlorine to kill as it's VERY effective and cheap. Over the last week we've seen our normal sources of chlorine disappear from the shelves as people start to catch on to our tricks. To help our users find various sources of chlorine we've also setup a map where users can submit their finds for others to benefit from. This map is still in it's VERY VERY early stages, but it's something we hope to see improve in the near future.
Wow this is so cool! How very clever and a great example we can all follow.
 
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