July 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Our goal for the Apollo 50 campaign was to lead the nation in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo program, with the campaign peaking during the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. The campaign began in September 2018, and while the campaign will continue to celebrate the 50th anniversaries of the rest of the Apollo missions, this phase concluded in August 2019. 

The content opportunities surrounding an event as iconic as the first Moon landing are seemingly endless. To create continuity and guidelines for posts in this campaign, three messaging goals were created:

  • Share excitement about Apollo and space in general to inspire the public to dream big and think about what else people might achieve
  • Provide those who were not alive in 1969 a look at what it was like to experience the Moon landing
  • Establish the museum as the caretaker of Apollo history, emphasizing our vast Apollo collection

See all of our #Apollo50 tweets.
View our Instagram account.
View our Facebook page.

Highlights from the campaign can be found below.

We announced our Apollo 50 celebrations on the anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s iconic “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech with a video of past and current aerospace icons reciting key lines from the speech. This set up the spirit of the Apollo 50 campaign, capturing the inspiration and excitement of the country’s quest for the Moon and looking forward to what is next. 

 

 

Social Media

In the lead-up to the big anniversary in July, our strategy was to apply Apollo to conversations or moments already occurring online, using Apollo as a lens with which to view other things happening in the world or on social media.

As the anniversary got closer, we counted down to the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 with a 50-day tweet thread highlighting Apollo-related artifacts in our collection.

We shared sneak-peeks at Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit and information about the conservation process before unveiling the spacesuit in its new display on July 16.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The OG lunar spacesuit is back on display! To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of #Apollo11, Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit is on display for the first time in 13 years! Before being readied for display, it underwent a multi-year conservation, thanks to the support of over 9,000 Kickstarter backers. As part of that process, a state-of-the display case and mannequin were designed to provide a stable environment for the suit’s display. The case replicates the conditions of our climate-controlled storage by controlling temperature, lighting, relative humidity, and ventilation. The mannequin allows air circulation through the mannequin system and will slow degradation by pulling unwanted vapors, caused by the breakdown of the rubber in the suit, away from the spacesuit. #Apollo50 #AirSpacePhoto

A post shared by National Air and Space Museum (@airandspacemuseum) on

We collaborated with Major League Baseball to bring replicas of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit to ballparks around the country — and share that experience online. 

Our posts emphasized that we have an unmatched Apollo collection.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

During the #Apollo missions, each command module had on board a survival kit in case it splashed down far from the recovery vessels. (The design of the CM kept the crew safe from intense frictional heat during reentry, but it limited precise landings.) Thankfully, this kit from #Apollo11 was never used. It contained an emergency radio beacon with replacement batteries, three water jugs, multi-functional survival lights with compasses, fishing line, water purification tablets, a fire starts, three pairs of sunglasses, two bottles of sunscreen, and a machete. In the end, all Apollo spacecraft landed no more than a few miles from their target zones. This survival kit is in our collection. #Apollo50

A post shared by National Air and Space Museum (@airandspacemuseum) on

This photo of the three Apollo 11 spacesuits side-by-side for the first time in 50 years, which was taken for the purpose of sharing on social media, was the most successful tweet of the campaign (and the most successful tweet of all time on our account).

 

We shared key moments from the mission as they happened.
 

And got even more in-depth with our @ReliveApollo11 “live-tweet” of the mission, sparking conversation from social media users about their memories of Apollo. This small-but-mighty account of 12,000 followers punched above its weight, receiving an estimated 3.75 million impressions and 140,000 engagements.  View the account.

We focused on giving people who were not alive to experience Apollo a taste of what it was like to be there, strategically leveraging @ReliveApollo11 to do so.

We brought our once-in-a-life activation on the National Mall to people around the country through photos of the Saturn V projection on the Washington Monument, shared every night to generate excitement. The morning before the first “Apollo 50: Go for the Moon” show, during which the Saturn V would launch after days , we shared a clip to generate excitement. Social media users shared their reactions using #GoForTheMoon and we engaged with them.

After the anniversary passed, we kept the momentum going, releasing a behind-the-scenes video of the projection project, and a video of the full projection show.

 

 
 

Our year-long Apollo 50 campaign allowed us to create a variety of content, which ranged from informative to inspirational to whimsical. We connected with people who remember where they were when Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center and people who wish they could have been alive to see it. And we reminded people around the country and the world that the Apollo program was history’s greatest adventure — and that space is pretty amazing.

 

Digital Content

The Museum's Apollo related content and information about the Apollo 50 celebration were collected on an Apollo 50 microsite.

As part of the Apollo 50 campaign, we posted a new blog every weekday in July until the Apollo 11 splashdown anniversary. In total, we published 22 blogs ranging in topic from from lesser-known figures to the 3D scanning and printing of artifacts to the art and music of Apollo. View all blogs.

We also collaborated with Google to feature our content in Google search. Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit and command module Columbia were available to explore in 3D and AR through Google search. We also worked with Google Arts & Culture and creative agency R/GA to produce STAMPs, Google’s story version of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs), which are fast-loading pages for mobile. STAMPs are visual, vertical stories that are swiped through with a similar user functionality to Instagram Stories, but in this case, with much more advanced animation. R/GA created 20 STAMP stories featuring museum expertise and content, ranging from profiles of the Apollo astronauts and other key members of the mission to the technology behind the mission. The STAMPs appeared in mobile search when a user Google searched a related topic, making it possible to reach people where they were. See all STAMPS.

 

Campaign Success

Throughout the campaign, we sent 626 Apollo 50 posts across the main National Air and Space Museum Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, receiving an estimated 27 million impressions, 800,000 engagements, and 45,000 link clicks. 

To better understand the numbers from the eight-day anniversary period, a baseline was established by averaging an eight-day timeframe from each of the previous 12 months. This table compares this baseline average with the museum’s social media metrics from July 16 to 24, 2019 (these numbers only include the main National Air and Space Museum accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and do not include @ReliveApollo11).

 

METRIC BASELINE AVERAGE JULY 16-24, 2019 INCREASE
Total impressions 2,321,556 17,030,810 +734%
       
Total engagements 47,743 581,845 +1,219%
Engagements per Facebook post 663 5,453 +822%
Engagements per Tweet 456 710 +156%
Engagements per Instagram post 1,261 1,829 +383%
       
Total follower growth 1,431 19,325 +1,350%
Facebook follower growth 400 6,083 +1,521%
Twitter follower growth 416 5,463 +1,313%
Instagram follower growth 615 7,779 +1,264%
       
Twitter link clicks 1,746 16,159 +925%
Facebook link clicks 2,327 20,124 +865%
Instagram profile visits 25 697 +2,788%

 

The engagement numbers above show that we reached an unprecedented number of people, helping us to achieve our goal of educating the public about the Apollo missions. The campaign posts with the most engagement show that we were also success in leading the conversation and were seen as creative and innovative. Further, according to engagement numbers, the top three posts on each platform were:

Facebook:

  • The first photo of the "Go for the Moon" projection
  • An archival photo of the three Apollo 11 astronauts
  • The video of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon

Twitter:

  • Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong’s spacesuits together
  • The first "Go for the Moon" photo
  • The Armstrong spacesuit in its display case

Instagram

  • The first "Go for the Moon" photo;
  • The LEGO Buzz Aldrin from the Apollo 50 Festival
  • The Armstrong spacesuit in its display case

The top three posts on Twitter and Instagram were all of museum artifacts or photos from the our celebration, and the most popular post on Facebook was from our celebration. More than just sharing history, we were making history.

We also received a lot of visits to our digital content, including 450,000 views on the Apollo 50 microsite and over 20,000 vists on the new Apollo 50 blogs received over 20,000 web visits. The STAMPS were also a success, with comparatively high average time on page and a low bounce rate. Three of the STAMP stories, about software engineer Margaret Hamilton, food scientist Rita Rapp, and the mission overall, were featured on Google’s Discover page, and during the month of July received about 150,000, 100,000 and 80,000 page views, respectively. 

The campaign also hit the three messaging goals. We shared the excitement of the Apollo missions and inspired inspiring its audience with archival posts, spotlights on the groundbreaking men and women who worked on Apollo, and through the "Go for the Moon" activation. We used the @ReliveApollo11 account and other real-time posts to recreate for those not alive in 1969 the excitement of experiencing the Moon landing. We shared our collection through social media posts, 3D models, blogs, STAMPs and more.

The Apollo 50 social and digital media campaign played a key part in establishing the National Air and Space Museum as a leader of the Apollo 11 50th anniversary celebration. It taught people about Apollo; it put the museum in the center of the conversation; it helped strengthen oursocial media presence; and it shared the messages we wanted emphasized. Mission accomplished.