As part of the first phase of Local to Global, the 'Discover the UK’s UNESCO Sites' was a seven-week creative social media and press marketing campaign in Summer 2023 led by the UK National Commission for UNESCO in partnership with Visit Britain and supported by GREAT and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The centrepiece of the campaign was an illustrated map highlighting all 58* land-based UNESCO designations in the British Isles through illustrated depictions of iconic landmarks and place names.
The purpose of the Discover the UK’s UNESCO Sites campaign was to raise awareness across the population of the British Isles and overseas visitors about the 58* site-based UNESCO designations in the UK (World Heritage Sites, Global Geoparks, Biosphere Reserves and Creative Cities). The map was designed to encourage more visits to these sites, in particular the lesser known designations.
The UK National Commission for UNESCO commissioned a team of designers and creatives to bring the map to life as an interactive digital version, an animated short film 'flyover', a series of social media posts and stories. A limited print run of 25,000 hardcopies of the English version of the map were produced and distributed. Translated versions of the map - in the seven "priority languages" identified by Visit Britain (Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Welsh) were also produced.
* Figure correct at time of campaign.
At least 30 independent press articles were published on the map, driving users to the interactive map which received 36,397 total views from 27,387 individuals since its launch. Average daily visitors to the UKNC website (1,411) rocketed 600% compared to the four weeks prior (234).
64.4% of visits to the digital map came from organic social media or webpage referrals, which suggests that the network played a vital role in driving interest and engagement with the map. The accompanying social media campaign had a minimum 2,125,136 impressions worldwide resulting in 19,794 total engagements across UKNC and key partner channels. The majority of the 52,955 viewers watched 96% of the short film.
The UKNC worked with a translation agency and designers to produce multilingual maps, press releases and social media posts in the 7 priority languages of Visit Britain (Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Welsh). As a result, 38.4% of digital map users were from outside the UK while 27.1% accessed the map in a first language other than English.
2,725 click throughs from the main interactive map hosted on the UKNC website to individual sites webpages. The top 20 most popular sites demonstrated good range of geographies and designation types. An average engagement time of 43 seconds on the UKNC website and 113 second on the National Lottery Heritage Fund website, while 52,955 viewers of the short film on average watched 44 seconds or 96% of the film. This suggests high quality engagement with the digital map.
