National State Tourism Directors Mercury Awards > Special Projects

A Shining Example During the Total Solar Eclipse

About This Entry:

Opportunity: Oregon was the first state in the nation to witness the total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017. As the state with the best chance of clear skies, we were faced with the possibility of 1 million visitors coming into the 70-mile-wide path of totality that stretched across Oregon.

Target Audience: In addition to our drive markets, we targeted solar eclipse enthusiasts, many of whom would travel thousands of miles to be among the first to witness this rare celestial event.

Overall Description: While many locals were worried about a large influx of people to Oregon, we saw this as an opportunity to educate and inspire visitors. We asked ourselves how we could encourage visitors to come early and stay late while also enhancing their experiences, so they would go home and tell their friends about their great vacations in Oregon. With the possibility of traffic jams and wildfires, we wanted to prepare them, not scare them, while also preserving this beautiful place we call home. We ensured preservation of Oregon’s scenic splendor by educating guests about how to participate in thoughtful recreation and travel so they would leave Oregon as they found it. We also engaged health care providers, food vendors, gas station operators, truckers, Oregon residents and businesses in the path of totality, as well as local, national and international media.

Campaign Strategy:

Idea: Our objective was to prepare visitors and residents for a safe and enjoyable eclipse experience and to inspire visitors to return. We engaged the Office of Emergency Management to form partnerships with over 60 states, county, municipal, federal and nonprofit partners to achieve four main goals. First, to have traffic congestion post-eclipse not to exceed three times the normal congestion for more than eight consecutive hours. Second, to have no fatalities in eclipse-related traffic incidents. Third, to have no wildfires started by eclipse visitors. Lastly, to have hospital visits proportional to the crowd.

Strategy: Understanding a major tourism event like the eclipse could have unintended consequences, we met with life safety agencies to adopt key messages. Keep Oregon moving: Arrive early, stay put, leave late. Keep yourself healthy: Stay cool, stay hydrated, stay informed. Keep yourself safe: No campfires, no fireworks, carry a first aid kit. Keep Oregon safe: See something, say something.

Tactics: 50,000 eclipse guides were distributed through Oregon State Welcome Centers and inserted into all orders of the Travel Oregon Official Visitor Guide between April 2017 and August 2017. The guide shared information about traveling, safety and expected crowds. It encouraged visitors to extend their stays with suggested itineraries. More than 75,000 tear-off maps were distributed to frontline staff to use with visitors. A dedicated page of TravelOregon.com included key safety messaging and itineraries starting and ending at cities within the path of totality. Travel Oregon conducted robust outreach using press releases and social media, starting a year before the eclipse. We scheduled prewritten social media posts from local agencies — including Oregon Department of Transportation and public health groups — and strategically paired prevention messaging. We collaborated with South Carolina — the last state to witness the eclipse — on a contest called “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” Travel Oregon’s Director of Communications organized a press conference with Governor Kate Brown and other agency partners. We collaborated with county and city emergency managers and communicators on Joint Information Center best practices and opened a multi-agency center to coordinate a dozen local joint information centers.

Results:

We had a total cost of $131,500.
Traffic, while heavy, was not triple normal congestion levels for more than eight hours. We worked with ODOT to gather real-time traffic volumes and historical traffic volume to compute a ratio of actual travel time to the average travel time for similar August weekdays in the past five years. There were no traffic fatalities and no major crashes. There were no human-caused eclipse-related wildfires. There was a small increase in hospital visits over last year, which emergency medical facilities were able to handle. Travel Oregon worked with the Oregon Health Authority to monitor this spike using a syndromic surveillance system.

Social media captured 13,240 leads via a Facebook form that pointed to safety messages, itineraries and order forms to receive a free eclipse guide and branded Travel Oregon eclipse glasses. We also coordinated and streamed a Facebook Live event with state officials answering questions that garnered 223,000 views.

We shared a livestream of the eclipse from the path of totality to our Facebook page and shared two time-lapse videos of the event from two locations in Oregon. These resulted in a combined 861,522 views.

Our total web impressions for eclipse informational and inspiration content were 279,315. Our total video impressions for eclipse content were 1,084,522. Our total media circulation consisted of 115 total stories, 415.1 million impressions, and an average story score of 8.6 out of 10.
Eclipse guides were distributed to nearly every state and Canadian province - including 13,399 in Oregon; 2,132 in California; 777 in Texas; 491 in British Columbia.; 2,914 in Washington; and 385 in Minnesota.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

The goals of this campaign may have been modest, but they were extremely well-defined, making it very easy to gauge the campaign's success. By all those measures, this campaign was a smashing success! The judges were specifically impressed with Oregon’s strategy to imaginatively taking advantage of a rare natural phenomenon and turn it into a win for tourism. Oregon impressively leveraged partnerships to increase both safety and effectiveness. The showed a creative use of resources and channels to get a great result. The campaign achieved quantifiable results, and it was easy to measure the campaign's success against well-defined goals. There were 13,000 leads generated and 115 stories, as well as 1 million views on Facebook Live. Most importantly, the campaign helped efficiently moved tons of people through the state safely and effectively.