TV3 – doing right but please get it right!

Just saw a very touching article on TV3′s Nightline about “Baby Miracle” – a badly deformed baby that, according to doctors in Samoa, shouldn’t survive. She has survived for 2 months now but needs urgent medical help Auckland (or anywhere but Samoa as they don’t have the facilities).

Please have a look at this clip – Baby Miracle and then, if you can help, send an email to tvsamoa@lesamoapost.co.nz to let them know that you would like to help.

So what didn’t TV3 get right? Well, I immediately wanted to contribute so, as directed on Nightline, I went to TV3′s website for more information. Do you think I could find anything there about the article? Nothing – not a link to a story, a link to a donation site or even a number to call. Now – I am, what we’d term, a ‘sophisticated web user’ meaning I know how to find info on the net, it’s second nature – so I didn’t just do a cursory look. However, on my 3rd attempt at loading the page (about 30mins after the story ran) I finally found a link in the ‘Video On Demand’ segment.

I imagine that less persistent and web-savvy visitors who, on seeing the article, wanted to help may have given up after a few minutes of searching. Others may have entered a search term ‘Baby Miracle’ but their results would have bought up the ‘Bargain Miracle Baby’ Google adword. Even more persistent searchers would have decided to email TV3 to find out more but, as I discovered, you have to register and login to even send an email enquiring about a story!

Well by the time you’ve gone through all this rigmarole you’d be forgiven for giving up, saying ‘well, at least I tried’ and thinking you’ll go to bed and do something about it in the morning. Then getting up and getting into your workday and forgetting all about it.

So well done TV3 for actually giving this story airtime but if you’d been a little more prepared you would probably have captured a lot more potential donations – maybe a little banner in the top right for an hour (replacing the Woman’s Day People’s Choice Awards banner), or even replace that Deal or No Deal hero banner for an hour. It doesn’t take much do whip up a banner and chuck it on the site.

Hopefully TV3 RSS subscribers will read the article tomorrow or someone else will pick up on this story and run it again – or maybe TV3 will dedicate a bit more space to it.

Moan over.