3. IYPH
Outputs

The partnership between the FAO Office of Corporate Communications (OCC), the FAO Agriculture Department — since renamed the Plant Production and Protection Division (NSP) — and the IPPC Secretariat started in late 2019, prior to the launch of the IYPH.

To promote the Year, FAO produced a series of multilingual videos, which outlined what the general public, farmers and agribusinesses, governments and the private sector can do to protect plant health.

An animated video, Can you imagine a life without plants?, was promoted many times over the Year and across all FAO social media channels in all languages. Between December 2019 and July 2021, the video received nearly 250 000 cumulative views (105 700 on Twitter, 64 000 on LinkedIn, 32 000 on Facebook, 13 800 on Instagram and 13 900 on YouTube).

In addition, a multilingual Curtain Raiser video was produced with an external company specifically for the launch of the IYPH campaign. It received over 2.8 million cumulative views.

All videos are available on a dedicated IYPH playlist on FAO’s YouTube channel.

Since the launch, IYPH content was promoted on official FAO social media channels in the six official languages and was made available via the dedicated Trello Board managed by OCC. It was shared with FAO country offices and United Nations System organizations. Some of the content was also translated into Farsi, Japanese and Portuguese, and is available on Trello board. 

Social media highlights are presented in chapter 3.5.2.

3.5.1 Key web highlights

The IYPH website had 157 000 users and 374 000 page views between the launch of the website in December 2019 and the preparation of this report in July 2021. Visitors spent an average of 2:08 minutes on the IYPH website. The IYPH website and all the related events were extensively promoted on many pages of fao.org, and was always featured on the FAO homepage for the duration of the Year.

The IPPC website hosting information regarding the ISC had more than 50 000 visits in the period between 1 November 2019 and 5 July 2021.

Figure 3. This figure shows the number of visitors on the IYPH website by month. The website recorded important peaks after the launch in January, February and March 2020, and again across the World Food Day campaign during September and October 2020.

Figure 4. This figure shows the sources of traffic to the IYPH website. Almost 53% of traffic was direct, 28% was organic and 13% was from social (Facebook 46%, Twitter 41%, LinkedIn 10%). Note: In some cases, traffic coming from social media mobile apps that have restricted privacy settings cannot be accurately measured by the Google Analytics tool, and those sources are partially recorded as “direct”.

Figure 5 shows that web traffic was particularly high for “new visitors” (71%) visiting the IYPH website for the first time. 

Figure 5. This pie chart provides the percentage share of “new visitors” and “returning visitors” on the IYPH website during the overall period from the launch in December 2019 to July 2021.

Figure 6 shows the regional breakdown of traffic to the IYPH website. Cumulative traffic from Europe is the highest with 35% of users, followed by Asia with 29% and the Americas with 23%. There were significant peaks from specific countries: India (11%), United States of America (9%), Philippines (6%), Australia (6%). The top 10 countries are listed in the figure.

Figure 6. This chart shows the traffic on the IYPH website by continent and by country during the overall period from the launch in December 2019 to July 2021. 

3.5.2 Key social media highlights

OCC promoted all IYPH content in the six official languages across all official channels.

By 14 July 2021, 1 820 plant health posts were shared via FAO’s multilingual social media accounts. The Organization was mentioned nearly 29 200 times by other social media accounts and had the opportunity to be seen by over 473 million social media accounts in their feed.

Note: Data are drawn from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Due to API limitations from LinkedIn, TikTok, Weibo and WeChat, these services are not currently being monitored.

Figure 7. This figure provides the total number of posts on FAO and IPPC accounts related to IYPH. Data drawn from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

Figure 8. This figure provides the number of retweets by other accounts of FAO and IPPC posts related to IYPH. Data drawn from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

Figure 9. This figure provides the cumulative potential reach of FAO/IPPC posts related to IYPH. The reach is high in December 2019 due to a paid campaign on Facebook for the launch video and the support received from the main United Nations account. The reach had a peak also in August 2020 thanks to the support received from the English- and Spanish-language United Nations Facebook accounts, which shared an animated video on the IYPH and a video on the four actions to support plant health. There was also a significant peak in December 2020 due to the large number of posts published by official FAO accounts that were picked up by other major outlets. June 2021 saw another high peak caused by mentions from accounts with large followings, such as China Xinhua News (91 million followers). Data drawn from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.