Making a splash
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January 17, 2021

Overview

The Reef-World Foundation is the leading voice on practical sustainability solutions for the scuba diving and snorkelling industry. Its work has been proven to reduce threats to coral reefs.

Reef-World’s vision is to make sustainable diving and snorkelling the norm by driving positive behaviours to protect the environment through its flagship initiative: Green Fins. The charity runs Green Fins globally in partnership with the UN Environment Programme. Green Fins provides low-cost and practical solutions to local and industry-wide environmental challenges. It also provides education and capacity-building support to empower environmental champions to put proven coastal resource management approaches in place.

The challenge

Having never had a communications professional on the team, Reef-World needed to streamline and upscale its strategy to increase global awareness of its work.

The strategy

As well as maintaining a close working relationship with government, NGO and industry partners and members, Melissa widened the charity’s communications focus to also reach travellers (divers, snorkellers and swimmers) who might visit coral reefs and marine biodiversity hotspots. By teaching travellers how to behave in a sustainable way, the charity is helping them better understand why coral is so important and the threats it faces. Most importantly, it is teaching them what actions they can take to reduce their impact before they depart for their trip.

  • Developed and implemented a new cross-channel comms strategy based on brand & audience audits
  • Built a comprehensive press list of relevant media targets
  • Provided charity-wide media and communications training
  • Implemented new communications policies to enhance team performance
  • Teased media worthy stories out of the internal Reef-World team
  • Contacted key journalists with news and developments to get Reef-World on their radar (and into their articles!)

The results

Year one (2019-2020)

  • Doubled year-on-year press coverage: 291 articles compared to a baseline of 141
  • More than doubled article reach (125%): 2.7 million estimated coverage views compared to 1.2 million
  • Highlights included: The Times, UN Environment Programme, Lonely Planet, Harper’s BAZAAR, Bloomberg, Yahoo!, MSN, Travel Weekly, TTG, Skift, inews and Oceanographic

Melissa was Reef-World’s Communications Manager from March 2019 to February 2021.

Ready to chat?

Hello!

Great to hear you're interested in working together - I'm always keen to hear about exciting new stories from marine conservationists, potential commissions from editors and suitable briefs from prospective clients.

So, let's chat. You can send me an email (I aim to respond within three working days, usually sooner) or book a call below. I look forward to hearing from you.

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