Michael J. Fox Foundation brings patients and researchers together through webinars

Parkinson’s disease is a disorder attacking the central nervous system. It inhibits motor systems at first, affects thinking and behavior later and often induces dementia in its advanced stages. It has no cure, yet, meaning it lasts a lifetime. To those affected by Parkinson’s Disease, community support is central to its management.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research provides this support and more. Dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson’s and developing better treatments for those living with the disease, the foundation uses a variety of digital tools to engage, educate and inform its community of patients, supporters, researchers and health care providers.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation turned to the ON24 platform for help. With a powerful webinar platform in place, the foundation could serialize its resources and news updates, allowing visitors—both day-to-day consumers and researchers— to digest content on their own time.

In fact, the platform’s ease of use and overall convenience enabled the foundation to run a monthly series, Third Thursdays Webinars. In addition to serving its community, the foundation could finally:

• Better understand their audience and its needs. With a data-rich webinar platform in place, presenters can collect information on what messages resonate with which audience, what content is most useful for attendees and capture nuanced information that can inform future content and outreach efforts.
• Maintain live engagement through on-demand webinars and maximize reach. Through ON24, the foundation seamlessly transforms every live webinar into on-demand content, providing its community with a live forum to engage with the foundation at their convenience. This helps the foundation get the most out of its resources and build a strong center of expertise.
• Share information and vital resources. With the ability to embed downloadable resources directly in a webinar, the foundation can provide attendees with slide presentations, reports and other resources to read and share later. The foundation also uses additional interactivity tools within their webinars, such as polls, surveys and Q&A, to supply www.on24.com additional information on given topics and to promote the Fox Trial Finder, an online tool connecting volunteers with the clinical trials.
• Mobile and browser compatibility for any platform. For people living with Parkinson’s, laptops and computers are difficult to use. But with ON24, the foundation can offer webinars on virtually any platform, like the iPad—a popular choice among patients—with no downloads or add-ons required.