Sunshine Matters

I am proud to announce that last night VISIT FLORIDA received a Silver WOMMY in the Advocacy Award category for our Share A Little Sunshine campaign.  The WOMMY Awards were presented by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, the official international non-profit trade association dedicated to word of mouth and social media marketing, as part of the Social Media Week conference being held in Chicago.  Now in it’s 11th year, the WOMMY’s recognize the most innovative, inspiring and impactful marketing campaigns from across the globe.  The Advocacy Award category, new for 2016, was created to spotlight the best employee, brand or customer advocacy marketing program to achieve a business outcome.

VISIT FLORIDA won for our 237,000 Share A Little Sunshine fans who share their love for Florida through their own social media channels using #LoveFL.  As a result, more than 1.4 million pieces of user-generated content were created across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, giving us a reach of more than 1.8 billion over three years.  In addition, there are the physical aspects of the campaign, such as the Instameets that VISIT FLORIDA both hosted and attended in order to curate stronger relationships with our Florida fans.

All of this effort to encourage our passionate Florida fans paid off.  We experienced a 4.3 percent increase in visitation from 2014 to 2015, resulting in a record 106.6 million visitors to the state last year.

VISIT FLORIDA and SPARK, the agency who has been our guiding force for this effort, are honored to have been recognized in the Advocacy category alongside GoPro (who won the gold) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (the bronze).  Companies and organizations who won in the eight other categories include Microsoft, Intuit, Hulu, Nestle, General Mills, Kraft and The Horizons Foundation.

To learn more about Share a Little Sunshine, check out our website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.