June 01, 2021
How a COVID-19 Time Capsule went VIRAL
In April 2020, Natalie Long of LONG Creations, (like the rest of us) was becoming aware of the major life impact COVID-19 was about to become.
"We are all living through history and something I have said I wanted to do from the beginning is make a keepsake of this moment for us to look back on."
Thinking of how she kept diaries and saved her children's artwork along with photos of their time together - she stumbled on a brilliant idea. Natalie decided to build a COVID-19 time capsule! She embarked on a project to create a series of colorable workbooks for children and adults that would allow them to document their time through the pandemic. Not stopping there, she created additional pages for all kinds of contextual events such as Mother's Day, About my Pets and even Christmas During a Pandemic. This positive spin on all the negative coverage of an unprecedented time went VIRAL! Her Facebook followers loved it, shared it, and the time capsule ended up being picked up by Global News in late April.
While all this publicity for the (did I mention she was giving it away for free) time capsule was amazing, there was an unintended consequence of fame - Natalie's Dropbox download limit was quickly exhausted and people were no longer able to download the pdf file.
Knowing she needed to get the file hosting issue fixed ASAP, Natalie reached out to us (we had previously collaborated on other projects), and asked if we were able to help. Excited by the opportunity to enable such a worthy cause - we setup a page on our domain (letsembark.ca), with a prominent "Time Capsule" link, and hosted the file ourselves.
What followed was something we could not have begun to imagine. In a matter of days we went from hundreds, to thousands, to an all time high of nearly 16 THOUSAND hits per day. To date, the time capsule has been viewed nearly 500k times, and we could not be more honored to have had some small part in it's success.
A year later, we are amazed to see that the time capsule has been downloaded in almost every country across the globe. What started as a way for Natalie to help document the stay at home order with her children has spread like wildfire to bring a bit of joy to families around the world.
As a Techstars company, we are honoured that even in these early days of our company we have been able to #givefirst in this capacity. We are also grateful to Natalie for bringing us into this amazing project.
Download Time Capsule
Support Natalie by checking out her LONG Creations Facebook and her website http://www.longcreations.ca/.
