Mandela Day website inspires action and change

Take action. Inspire change. Make every day a Mandela Day.

So says the call to action on the relaunched Mandela Day website, www.mandeladay.com, a platform for global public service in honour of the great statesman and one that has particular relevance in the first year since his passing.

The site has been designed and developed by Flow Communications on behalf of the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) to pay homage to Madiba, to celebrate his legacy and to encourage the world to live by his values – on Nelson Mandela International Day, July 18, and every day.

It is an innovative, interactive portal that connects individuals, groups and communities as global change makers in the initiatives they are undertaking to make a difference.

“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.

Using bold, fluid visuals, engaging, informative content, and a ground breaking, responsive design, the site offers historical context on Mandela Day and ideas on how to take action. The site’s resource centre provides practical Mandela Day toolkits 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.

There is no excuse: everything you need is right at your fingertips.

Inspirational videos from change makers 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 website is written in the common PHP MySQL coding language and makes use of the publishing platform Expression Engine 2. Its responsive design means that it scales according to the device on which you are viewing it.

Says Richard Frank, head of the Flow Communications web development team, “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.”

#MandelaDay: It’s #Time2Serve