Title	EXPAT EXPLORER
Brand	HSBC
Product/Service	EXPAT EXPLORER SURVEY
Category	D01. Integrated Campaign led by PR
Entrant	HILL+KNOWLTON STRATEGIES London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	HILL+KNOWLTON STRATEGIES London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Placement	HILL+KNOWLTON STRATEGIES London, UNITED KINGDOM
PR	HILL+KNOWLTON STRATEGIES London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Karen Butcher	Hill+Knowlton Strategies	Senior Associate Director
Joey Ng	Hill+Knowlton Strategies	Account Director
Zoe Blackburn	Hill+Knowlton Strategies	Senior Account Manager
Ben Robinson	Hill+Knowlton Strategies	Data analyst
Amelia Worley	Hill+Knowlton Strategies	Account Executive
Delia Williams-Falokun	Hill+Knowlton Strategies	Account Executive

The Campaign

We came up with a simple, but powerful idea. Help and encourage local expat communities to grow organically, through a crowd-sourced report, created by expats, for expats. Expat Explorer is a community hub with everything you need to know about life abroad, shown in a way that is at once beautiful, engaging and easy to explore. The hub is full of the insights and viewpoints of real expats, based on real experiences. It’s all curated by us to provide interested readers and soon-to-be-expats with all of the practical and useful information they need, so they can focus on enjoying their move and settling into their new life and culture.

Execution

The Expat Explorer Survey was created from the data over 22,000 expats and is housed on our global interactive hub. We asked questions about schools, social life, language skills, cultural sensitivities, and much more. We then opened it up to the public, populated with rich, relevant crowd-sourced content and genuine insight about life abroad: Expat Hints and Tips – a platform for sharing true life stories about living and working abroad. Expat Findings – a collection of stories and insights from the Expat Explorer survey data, hand-picked and written by us. Expat Life – a video scripted from real expat quotes and Tweets, which has received over half a million views and growing. Careers Tool – information to help expats choose the right country to suit their career aspirations. The hub also regularly generates human interest stories for social and local media campaigns, to keep us constantly growing our community.

Since launching the 2015 findings to local and regional media, we’ve achieved 1,000 media pieces in over 40 countries, demonstrating that we’re still able to reach a wide network of expats right across the globe. The site continues to resonate with our target audience. To date, over a million people in more than 200 countries have used Expat Explorer Interactive to see where in the world they’d most love to go for their next adventure. Our aim with this campaign was to continue to drive traffic to the Expat Explorer Interactive tool among expat professionals and achieve high quality, top tier, positive coverage, with multiple waves of regional media activity – all of which we have consistently achieved. The survey has become one of the main reference points for media, gaining broadcast coverage on BBC World News and Bloomberg TV and it continues to make headlines long after the launch.

The Situation

The HSBC Expat Explorer campaign was designed to create a meaningful connection between the brand and their target audience. Our challenge was to build a reputation for HSBC as a bank that truly understands expats. We successfully built this reputation through a simple creative idea for a report. We then amplified the idea through traditional and digital public relations tactics, from curating media relations stories specific to each country to creating content for managing a social media community. The bank is now well-known for its Expat products, and the annual survey is bigger than ever.

The Strategy

Expats come from all walks of life. These are motivated people attracted by a world of opportunities, and the promise of jobs, experiences and people to meet around the globe. But moving overseas is also a huge step into the unknown in terms of changing friends and lifestyle. It became clear that what people really needed was information, insight and the emotional support to help them make this leap. Expat Explorer has tapped into a real audience need and given us a rich ongoing source of content for our always-on media relations and social media campaign. We’ve been able to source relevant stats to pitch into individual country media outlets, to continue to build on the momentum of the campaign and achieve consistently high coverage. We’ve also generated plenty of quotes which can be tweeted, picked up by our audience and retweeted or shared across different social media.