Background
The 7th Our Ocean conference was held in Palau in 2022 – a critical year for the ocean, and the first time the event had been hosted by a Small Island Developing State. The overarching aim of Our Ocean is to secure actionable and accountable commitments at scale with the ocean crisis. Communications INC has been active at every Our Ocean conference since the inaugural event in 2014, and has provided communications support to governments hosting the conference on several occasions.
Objective
Communications INC was commissioned to provide strategic and communications support to the event host and co-host to deliver a successful conference. Our key objectives were to share Our Ocean Palau with a global audience, to gain visibility in national and international media, to engage a wide range of stakeholders, and to create a legacy for the event reflecting the regional values it embodied.
Approach and delivery
We created a fresh brand identity and a new website for Our Ocean Palau, and we managed all the media work. We wrote press materials including opening and closing press releases, op-eds (including one on behalf of US Special Presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry) and blogs, and produced three multilingual toolkits for Social Media, Communications and Press containing gifs, social tiles, videos, suggested posts, and much more.
Communications INC also developed a social media and outreach strategy focused on a core team of eight communications professionals and bloggers from a variety of backgrounds. We worked with them to build momentum and support for the commitments showcased, helping them capture compelling content – including imagery and videos – to distribute via social media and other outlets around the world.
As Our Ocean gets closer to its 10th Anniversary, it was particularly important to link progress back to previous years while looking to the future to build on the conference’s legacy. Evaluating the effectiveness of communications work is key to continued strategic improvement, so we provided extensive reporting and analysis on press and social media coverage, website analytics and other indicators.
Impact
The 7th Our Ocean conference received global attention, and was mentioned more than 1,280 times in media outlets around the world. Based on total readership, press coverage of Our Ocean Palau reached a potential audience of 3.1 billion people, with some national governments putting out their own press releases to highlight commitments made at the event.
The event website gained well over 100,000 page views, with 8.5% of visits coming directly from social media activity. On Twitter, the account @OurOceanPalau built an engaged following of nearly 1,500 by the time of the conference, receiving just under 150,000 visits to its profile and 438,000 tweet impressions. Some 20,000 messages from 8,378 unique authors included Our Ocean keywords, and these were interacted with more than 60,000 times.