Bing delivers new COVID-19 experiences including partnership with GoFundMe to help affected businesses
Bing recently announced our work to help the world stay up to date on the latest with COVID-19. Today we’re announcing an expansion of this work in two areas that will allow organizations to leverage Bing data and search. First, we’re releasing our aggregated data to those in academia and research, and releasing a Bing-powered COVID-19 tracker widget for developers that is easy to embed on their sites. Second, we’re partnering with GoFundMe to help make it easier for small business owners affected by COVID-19 to raise money.
Expanding the reach of Bing COVID-19 data
Bing has already released a full-page map tracker of case details by geographic area. Now, those working in academia and research can access our data on cases by geographic area at bing.com/covid/dev or on GitHub. This dataset is pulled from publicly-available sources like the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control, and more. We then aggregate the data and add latitude and longitude information to it, to make it easier for you to use. Since COVID-19 data is constantly evolving, we have a 24 hour delay so we can ensure the stability of the data that we include. This data is available for non-commercial, public use geared towards medical researchers, government agencies, and academic institutions.
Today we’re also releasing a Bing-powered COVID-19 widget for developers who want to display this data on their sites to make it available more broadly across the web. If you’re interested in building a widget for your site, please visit our GitHub repository for instructions. The widget can be embedded in your site with just a few lines of HTML, and you can customize the default geographical location and language, as well as which modules are displayed.
Partnering with GoFundMe
Bing is also partnering with GoFundMe to help small businesses face the financial hardships caused by COVID-19.
If you’re a small business owner and already have a Bing Places for Business account, you can easily set up a GoFundMe fundraiser to rally your community and get financial support. Bing will showcase your GoFundMe on the Bing local listing page, making it easy for people to see how they can help. Bing Places customers can also update temporary store closure information and create special announcements in Bing Places to help customers find the latest updates about your business.
Getting started is easy:
● Create or sign in to your Bing Places for Business account
● Once you're signed in, click the “Get Started” button in the “Set up a GoFundMe fundraiser” module in your Bing Places dashboard to go to the GoFundMe fundraiser creation page
● Follow the prompts on GoFundMe as directed, and your fundraiser will now show up on Bing local listing pages, where customers can click directly to your GoFundMe to donate
If you don’t have a Bing Places account, you can claim your business on Bing Places where you can manage, customize your Bing business listing directly, and enable Bing users to engage with your business. In the coming weeks Bing will add support for existing GoFundMe campaigns.
We appreciate the feedback we’ve received so far and look forward to bringing these features to more people across the web.
Source: Bing Blog Feed