Objectives

The Bahamas is home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. However, when Hurricane Dorian wreaked havoc across the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama, their primary source of income was jeopardized. The Bahamas relies on the tourism industry to maintain a sustainable community for its residents. With the destruction of many tourism resources, CheapCaribbean saw an urgent need to help our Bahamian partners in the recovery process. We sought to provide awareness on the distress our beloved islands were facing by educating our customers, as well as raise funds to make an impact for the residents as quickly and effectively as possible with our limited resources.

Strategy and Execution

Within a few days of Hurricane Dorian’s landfall, CheapCaribbean established and implemented an integrated fundraising campaign to help the affected islands. We identified the organization we would support with our efforts, the National Association of The Bahamas, a volunteer organization working build a healthy economy in The Bahamas. Since our focus is to provide outstanding beach vacations to the Caribbean and surrounding areas, it was heartbreaking to see and hear about the devastation of these destinations, first-hand. We quickly established two priorities with this campaign: informing/educating our customers of impacted islands in order to drive tourism to unaffected areas, and assisting with the recovery efforts of the impacted islands. The "We Love You, Bahamas" campaign included emails, social media posts, blogs, public relations, site placements and internal communications. With the "We Love You, Bahamas" campaign, CheapCaribbean donated $10K:

• 100% of profit from bookings to The Bahamas made on September 17, 2019
• Proceeds from custom-made t-shirt sales and customer donations, as well as a 100% company match on donations

The campaign also involved:

• Dedicated emails to our full email list
• Internal communication on our campaign and how to get involved
• Dedicated landing page, which included a detail map explain which islands were impacted and which were still open for business.
• Social media posts, both organic and paid
• Internal communication on our campaign and how to get involved
• Responding to media and pitching our campaign
• Negotiating t-shirts at wholesale cost and launching a customer facing store to sell shirts and collect donations

Results

We far exceeded our objectives for the "We Love You, Bahamas" campaign; educating our customers and assisting in the recovery of the impacted islands. This campaign also garnered PR coverage from top outlets like People, Business Insider, Travel Weekly, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times and positioned us as experts on the Caribbean tourism industry. The response from our social following and customers was overwhelmingly positive further confirming our success with this campaign. We are so thankful to have been able to help the beach communities in need.

Results included (but not limited to):

• 255 shirts sold
• 28 cash donations
• Social posts garnered a reach of more than 490k and drove over 3k clicks
• Donated 100% of profits made from bookings to The Bahamas on September 17

16 feature articles, 13 mentions and two broadcasts reaching 929M people with an ad value of $2.8B, with $0 spend.

Media