AWARD Knowledge Festival and Graduation Ceremony: The Celebration of African Scientists & Researchers
by Steve Ngunyi & Katrina Nyawira The AWARD Knowledge Festival and Graduation Ceremony, held on…
This year, on June 1, we celebrated the vital role that dairy plays in delivering quality nutrition and promoting sustainability. Established by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 2001, World Milk Day acknowledges the dairy sector’s profound impact on society, the economy, and the environment. The theme for World Milk Day 2024 was focused on celebrating dairy’s contribution to quality nutrition and its role in nourishing the world.
The 2024 campaign was a success and came with interesting learnings on where online community engagement is heading. This year, with the campaign landing on a weekend, we achieved over 924.4 million impressions compared to 1.3 billion in 2023. The slight decrease in impressions is still an improvement from a similar decline observed in 2019 when the campaign also fell on a weekend—664 million impressions in 2019 versus 1.1 billion in 2018. In addition to the campaign falling on a weekend, the decline in impression numbers can also be attributed to a general decrease in Twitter activity since it transitioned to X (for example, active daily users on the mobile app decreased by 15% from February 2023 to February 2024).
There was a significant increase in LinkedIn usage by companies, suggesting a shift in platform preference. It is much more difficult to collect data from LinkedIn, which has privacy firewalls, than Twitter/X, which is a wide-open platform for many tracking tools. Working closely with GDP, we solicited numbers from companies and organizations who engaged on the day to get a more complete picture of the activity. Overall, we saw even greater interest in WMD, as shown by the higher engagement numbers – 2.7 million compared to last year’s 1.8 million. The substantial increase in engagement is a great win for the industry, and we anticipate this trend will contribute to even better metrics in 2025.
Through farmer videos, in-person events, farm tours, virtual campaigns, and new partnerships, the dairy sector showcased its dedication to delivering nutritious and sustainably made dairy products to their communities.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s campaign. Your involvement, whether through organizing events, sharing posts on social media, or sending in videos, made a significant impact. The collective effort to highlight the importance of dairy in our diets and its contributions to economic and environmental sustainability is truly commendable.
Cheers to everyone who supports the dairy industry. Together, we can achieve great things for nutrition, sustainability, and economic development.