2016 Overview
With respect to its Business Plan Key Activity of “promoting ICAO’s programmes, priorities, and achievements in a timely and effective manner,” the Communications Unit prepared and issued 96 news releases while publishing an additional 42 news highlights on ICAO’s public website. COM was 100 per cent effective in producing same-day news issuances on urgent ICAO priorities when requested.
Social media support for ICAO messaging saw great success in 2016. The Organization’s Facebook followers went from 1 554 to 32 9971, LinkedIn followers rose from 35 515 to 45 207, and Twitter followers went from
44 031 to 57 717.
The COM Unit responded to approximately 80 per cent of external social media queries in 2016 within 60 minutes. ICAO’s International Civil Aviation Day (ICAD) social media campaign generated a high level of global engagement, earning 245 400 impressions from the 52 tweets issued from @ICAO alone. A further 614 tweets were issued by others between 6 and 8 December mentioning the ICAD2016 hashtag we created: #FlyDay.
In total, ICAO’s 822 original tweets in 2016 resulted in 4.2 million viewer impressions.
With respect to editorial and trade content, the COM Unit either produced or contributed to 42 sectoral and trade articles on behalf of or featuring essential contributions from ICAO’s senior and technical officials.
By taking part in the Global NGO barometer in late 2015, COM received concrete metrics in early 2016 on ICAO’s levels of global awareness and general favourability ratings vis-à-vis the general public. Renewed participation in the Global NGO barometer will be pursued each triennium to gauge the aggregated success of the COM Unit’s triennial projects and efforts.
2016 also saw the Unit providing daily press summaries to senior ICAO staff due to the addition of new professional staff.
In terms of helping to raise awareness of ICAO within the local community, COM negotiated to have a free
30-second ICAO message included in the terminal screen rotation at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport throughout 2016, raising awareness of ICAO, the 39th Session of the Assembly, and the second World Aviation Forum. It also participated in collaborative Montréal Aviation Week activities and coordination with local air transport partners, and established new Headquarters outdoor kiosks on Robert-Bourassa Blvd.
In addition, COM negotiated new Letters of Agreement with local universities and colleges confirming ICAO’s itemized support for their Model United Nations activities and helping to raise awareness and increase youth interest in ICAO.
In seeking to ensure that ICAO is consistently portrayed as dynamic and responsive, COM, in conjunction with the ICT Web Unit, realized a completely redesigned ICAO public website in 2016. This included a great deal of work on responsive design foundations to ensure that a full and much more user-friendly mobile version of the site can be realized during 2017.
Executive Office support, in addition to the editorials and media interviews noted above, included a further 31 speeches on behalf of the President of the Council, and 60 on behalf of the Secretary General. Speeches were also prepared for the United National Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for his visits to ICAO and the Council in February, and other ad hoc support was provided on occasion to ICAO’s Directors.
COM also produced 21 videos in 2016: twelve in support of senior official presentations; one recording the United National Secretary-General’s visit to ICAO and the Council; and eight to promote ICAO/NCLB/GPAD priorities in general or our more specific projects and programmes (iMPLEMENT; UAS Toolkit; ICAD; UN-Habitat airport project; etc.).
1 The unusual Facebook growth derives from the fact that ICAO undertook merging and absorbing various Facebook impostor or duplicate pages in 2016. This process required to essentially start over from scratch, add another 26 506 followers during these merges, and then add a further 6 400 new over the remainder of the year.
