ICANN's Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) team is constantly working to increase regional participation by providing new opportunities to engage with ICANN. The following is a recap of our 2016 communications efforts that not only includes strengthening ICANN's presence in the region but also implementing a Mitigation Plan after the relocations of ICANN56 from Panama City, Panama, to Helsinki, Finland, and ICANN57 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Hyderabad, India.
We are very social!
During 2016, after a successful campaign on Twitter, our regional Twitter handles in Spanish and Portuguese are nearing 14,500 followers. An increase of 11k followers over the past year. Our French Twitter handle, which was relaunched last year and is used by the LAC and the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions, now has over 4K followers.
Our region utilizes scoop.it, a social platform where our team shares and compiles news about our releases and interviews with the regional media. During 2016, there were 89 articles covering our LAC activities. Articles written in Spanish and Portuguese are all available on our scoop.it page, both in Spanish and in Portuguese. These interviews received nearly 1,000 new visits in the past year (3500+ visits since 2013).
We also continued to share relevant videos on our regional YouTube list adding 8 new videos. The playlist has received over 1,6K views.
Explaining our Mitigation Plan
Besides publishing a blog post to our website explaining the Mitigation Plan and how we planned to make up for the missed engagement opportunities in our region, we also published two articles about the plan in other newsletters from our regional Internet ecosystem (LACTLD August 2016, ASIET August 2016).
We put together additional communications efforts (via both social and traditional media) to cover two key events that included the participation of our President and CEO Göran Marby (III LAC DNS FORUM, in Dominican Republic) and Senior Advisor to the President and Senior Vice President, Global Stakeholder Engagement, Sally Costerton (launching of Centre of Entrepreneurship and Internet – CEI LAC, in Paraguay; read more in our November newsletter).
Our mitigation plan also provided the opportunity to introduce our new President and CEO Göran Marby to the LAC Internet community. We organized an interview with Göran that was published in LACNIC's newsletter (6 questions in 140 characters: Get to know Göran Marby, ICANN's CEO) and he was featured as the central interview in the LACTLD Report (Leadership for a new Era)
Finally, we produced two videos to highlight the LAC participation at ICANN56 and ICANN57. The videos are available in English, Spanish and Portuguese in our regional YouTube Playlist.
Get our latest news
Another important communications effort includes our LAC newsletter that is distributed monthly to the regional community and sent simultaneously in the region's four main languages; Spanish, Portuguese, English and French. If you don't receive our regional newsletter, we highly encourage you to sign up by clicking here.
Visit our regional community website, icannlac.org, for updates and upcoming activities in your region!
We want to thank you for helping us reach these milestones. We are very proud to see an ever-growing interest in ICANN's LAC community work and communications efforts.
Be sure to stay tuned! Our 2016 LAC Year in Review report will be launched soon, which will include more highlights about our work in Latin America and the Caribbean (read the 2015 LAC Year in Review report here).
