The Water Sports Foundation’s national boating safety campaign this summer exceeded the organization’s expectations for media exposure.
The initiative produced more than 600 million boating safety media impressions from April to August and resulted in 490 news stories, WSF said in a statement.
Funded by an $89,000 nonprofit grant from the Coast Guard, the campaign landed 601,140,419 earned media impressions — nearly 10 times the initial goal of 65 million.
Coverage included live segments on the The Weather Channel; segments on ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX affiliates; online reporting; and newspaper stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today and others. Messaging reached hundreds of thousands of boaters, as well, according to WSF.
“Even though we worked with a scaled-down project budget to start, we have more than proven the concept and smashed our original goal, resulting in high profile coverage of boating safety in hundreds of media platforms throughout the United States during the busiest boating period of the year,” WSF executive director Jim Emmons said in a statement,
The campaign kicked off with the launch of the organization’s National Boating Safety Media Resource Center. “We knew we had to develop a strong website as the backbone of the campaign to supply high quality content and resources free of charge for media use and consumption,” Emmons said.
The public-relations team was headed up by veteran marine marketer Wanda Kenton Smith, who is a columnist for Soundings Trade Only.
A report on the project will be shared with the Coast Guard.
