“Saudi Welcomes the World”, the messaging platform of Hajj 2017, highlights the organizational excellence that Saudi Arabia provides and the emotional spiritual get together and its collective message of peace and compassion.

For the first time, we invited people from around the globe, regardless of religion, to join the journey through story-telling and story-making, bringing the core of Hajj to the digital world.

For the first time, people were able to discover the humans of Hajj, their stories, their emotions and their message to the world through technology, art, filmmaking, documentaries and photography, promoting real, raw and live footage as well as user-generated content.

The organizational excellence of Saudi Arabia accompanied the campaign to portray the behind the scenes logistics that bring together the pilgrims from all around the world, and make these stories possible.

Two team of copywriters and graphics was deployed 24/7 to create rapid content and disseminate it across the channels. In a period of 20 days, they created 51 docum-films, 10 infographics and over 100 posts in 3 languages. 5 webmasters worked on a 24/7 schedule to source UGC content and publish on SaudiWelcomesTheWorld.org in addition to archiving all assets sourced from the on- ground team. The on-ground team (10 people) crafted the final production film.

A digital advertising team was deployed 24/7 to promote live around the world based on timing (Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia, Africa). A team of data analysts/journalist monitored live conversations in a proprietary and customized digital control room to supply PR and the content team with contextual timely needs for rapid content creation.

A redundancy environment was set-up/monitored 24/7 with a team of 5 IT on rotation to secure website and performance.

Our own content got over 119 million impressions: Facebook and Instagram: 45,822,959 impressions, Google display and search: 59,989,457, Twitter: 7,511,551 impressions, and Snapchat 5,700,000 impressions and more than 10M social media engagements.

We had more than 14 million videos views: 8,122,185 views from Facebook, 2,497,882 views on Youtube and 4,093,180 views from Twitter. Our final film received over 1.8M views.

In just one week, saudiwelcomestheworld.org attracted 1,170 Million Visitors while the media portal, got over 80,000 visits.

Our campaign increased the positive perception of the Saudi’s Excellence in organizing Hajj by 28% and reduced the negative perception by 25% from the 25th of August till the 4th of September.