On September 20, Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm made landfall on Puerto Rico causing widespread destruction to infrastructure and incurring at least 64 official fatalities, with some organizations reporting more than 500 deaths as a result of the storm. Each year, UTC donates $250,000 to the American Red Cross to prefund disaster relief, but UTC greatly expanded support for Puerto Rico due to the scale and scope of the damage.
On the island, UTC has two business sites with more than 2,000 employees:
From the moment Puerto Rico was threatened, employees across UTC held weekly calls to monitor the situation, and immediately after the storm, colleagues remained closely aligned to confirm the safety of all employees on the island. In the days and weeks following the storm, employees across the business coordinated efforts to restore operations at facilities and to assist employees and their families. These efforts included more than $1 million of support in the form of chartered flights to deliver generators to the island, the allocation of a full-time disaster relief manager and the shipment of 2,500 toys for the holidays.
We're proud of the passionate work our employees contributed to Puerto Rico, and we wanted to ensure their stories were told with authenticity and compassion. In November of 2017, our Associate Director of Public Relations, Brad Drazen and a lean video team traveled to company sites in Connecticut, Charlotte, N.C., West Palm Beach, Fla., and Puerto Rico to begin telling those stories. They filmed a series of interviews and videos with UTC leadership, employees and impacted residents on the island.
Implementation:
From the footage shot in Puerto Rico and our mainland sites, the team drafted 12 scripts to tell a distinct and concise story within each video. Our internal video production team and a contractor from Frontline Productions edited the series of two-minute videos for UTC's website and intranet.
In the social media environment, viewers' attention spans are much shorter, so the social media team created channel-specific content from the full videos for our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn pages. In addition:
To avoid oversaturating our audience with Puerto Rico content, we published the videos on bi-weekly basis and adjusted our paid dollars as the campaign progressed to support the videos that elicited the most engagement from our followers.
At the conclusion of our campaign, the Puerto Rico relief videos compiled more than 668,000 views. The videos were the biggest hit on our Facebook page. We had more than 14,000 engagements, and there were great conversations within the comments between employees and residents of Puerto Rico. This campaign far out-performed many of our previous metrics, and the videos become our most engaging, most commented on and most viewed campaign of all time. Lastly, we were able to translate those engagements to nearly 1,600 new followers.
On Instagram, our videos and employee-sourced content received more than 53,500 views with 700+ engagements. On Twitter, the videos received 165,000+ views, but had less engagement than Instagram at 505. Our organic campaign on LinkedIn proved to be a steady source of engagements with an average of 140 per post, and utc.com received 25% of its traffic from our shared links.
Overall, our Puerto Rico relief campaign has been a very robust and integrated campaign across our internal/external channels and a great collaborative effort between the Communications team and employees across our businesses.
