Content Strategy
Building community with creative calculus
How a playful content strategy for Pi Day earned traffic, fans, and NASA-wide impact while sparking a deeper love for math.
Project Title: NASA Pi Day Challenge
Summary: I developed and led what became NASA’s flagship initiative for Pi Day, creating vibrant and friendly visuals to simplify complex concepts, collaborating with subject-matter experts, and earning sustained audience engagement over more than a decade of annual campaigns.
My Role: Content Strategy • Content Development • Illustration • Graphic Design • Campaign Management • Educational Content Design
The Opportunity:
Mmm, Pi Day
I was looking for new ways to boost traffic to the JPL Education website and deepen engagement across our social media channels.
By testing different strategies and tracking performance, I found that connecting content to trending topics reliably sparked audience engagement. So I started identifying potential news hooks that aligned with our goals.
Pi Day, already a popular celebration beyond the classroom, stood out. It offered a rare opportunity to support educators, engage students, and spotlight NASA missions in a fun and accessible way.
It was also a chance for JPL Education to shape the Pi Day story for NASA.
The Goals:
Math on a Mission
My goal was to create a digital initiative for Pi Day that would:
Give teachers fun, classroom-ready resources for Pi Day.
Engage students by connecting math to NASA space exploration.
Attract new audiences to JPL Education.
Position JPL to lead NASA’s Pi Day campaign.
The Work:
Putting Pi in the Sky
In 2014, I launched the first NASA Pi Day Challenge, a set of four illustrated math problems based on real NASA missions and designed to get students excited about math.
The problems were developed by JPL’s K–12 education specialists, and I brought them to life with playful, approachable visuals.
The challenge quickly became one of our top-performing campaigns. But I saw an opportunity to turn it into something much bigger.
Here’s how I shaped and expanded the initiative into an annual flagship campaign for NASA:
Collaborated with JPL education specialists to select and shape the math problems, guiding the tone and approach to spark students’ curiosity and make them feel part of NASA’s discovery process.
Designed and illustrated the problems using vibrant colors, unexpected details, and a friendly visual language to make technical content inviting and accessible.
Led cross-team coordination with JPL and NASA teams to promote the campaign agency-wide and secure international press coverage.
Directed the creative evolution of the campaign by analyzing traffic, engagement, and audience feedback to expand its reach, growing the content suite to include:
Event and challenge landing pages
Standards-aligned lessons and classroom resources
“Teachable Moments” science explainers
Posters, infographics, and promotional graphics
General-interest articles about how pi is used at NASA
Created a cohesive visual identity across all campaign materials, blending illustration and graphic design to support diverse learning experiences.
The infographic I created for the first NASA Pi Day Challenge in 2014.
The Impact:
An Infinite Love
10+ years, 40+ illustrated math problems, multiple agency-wide campaigns, countless students inspired.
The NASA Pi Day Challenge became a widely recognized campaign that continues to engage students, support educators, and highlight NASA missions in a fun, accessible way.
Key achievements include:
Top traffic-driver to the JPL Education website, with up to 150,000+ page views during the campaign month.
Consistently among NASA’s highest-performing social content, driving strong engagement.
Year-over-year growth in traffic and engagement—up over 700% in the first 3 years.
Adopted agency-wide, with NASA centers across the country amplifying the challenge through their channels and networks.
Expanded educator participation and student engagement through classroom resources that deepened impact beyond the campaign.
Credits
Content Strategy: Kim Orr
Curriculum Development: Ota Lutz, Lyle Tavernier, Brandon Rodriguez
Educational Content Design: Kim Orr
Content Development: Kim Orr, Lyle Tavernier, Ota Lutz, Brandon Rodriguez
Illustration: Kim Orr
Graphic Design: Kim Orr
Animation: Scott Hulme
Campaign Management: Kim Orr
Social Media: Kim Orr, Lyle Tavernier
Web Production: Kim Orr, Lyle Tavernier