The Power of a United Front

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you for your support in making February 1st, 2023 – Unclaimed Property Day - an overwhelming success in raising awareness of these critical programs that protect consumer and property rights, and returns over $4 billion dollars annually through our shared efforts!

As NAUPA President and Nebraska Treasurer John Murante said in his recent Thought Leader Thursday article, "Our messages are stronger when we come together in one bipartisan voice to be heard nationwide." This year, states (and our partners in Canada and Kenya ) came together to be heard worldwide.

Starting on Jan 23rd, NAUPA’s two national audio campaigns went live, one promoting general unclaimed property awareness and the other supporting unclaimed property day. Unclaimed.org’s traffic doubled from 10,000 to 20,000 average daily users. We received an additional bump on January 25th as unclaimed property was featured across the country via digital and television platforms that broadcast "Rossen Reports."

On February 1st and 2nd, traffic to unclaimed.org saw a 400% jump to 50,000 daily users. The newly relaunched MissingMoney.com received a massive increase in searches and a 540% increase in claims filed compared to an average day. In those two days, we experienced nearly a million searches, roughly 1/8th of the 8 million plus searches made since the October 22nd relaunch!

On social media, #unclaimedpropertyday reached over 300,000 users and received hundreds of likes, interactions, and mentions. One of NAST’s own tweets was featured in the Business Insider as a savvy use of memes.

In traditional media,  NAST tracked 172 stories that directly mentioned Unclaimed Property Day. General unclaimed property coverage was 6 times higher than normal. From Jan 27th to February 4th, we saw 615 stories on these programs compared to just 134 the previous week. In addition to local stories, NAUPA pitched national stories that were featured in CNBC, Business Insider, and Yahoo Finance.

Our detective-themed social media campaign was a success, and we enjoyed introducing our Inspector character to the world. We hope to find ways to continue to use him to amplify our message that through our programs we can help individuals follow the clues in our databases to solve the mystery of their missing property.Thank you again for your constant efforts to return more property and promote these programs. We invite your PR and communications staff to join us on the monthly NAUPA Communications Committee calls to continue to coordinate our efforts and share best practices throughout the year.

Sincerely,

Laura Hudson
NAUPA Communications Committee Chair