TransLink - What's the T Podcast: transforming how we communicate with customers

Target Audience: Traditionally, transit thinks of its riders as simply either choice or captive. At TransLink, we believe our riders are much more nuanced than that. Our Customer Experience Action Plan, focuses on five different mindsets to help tailor the work we do for each customer: accessible, practical, flexible, cautious, and advantageous. We focused on the "practical" rider, aged 25-34 who are on their transit journey as our podcast's primary audience. Having a defined audience persona was essential as talking to everyone is akin to "boiling the ocean." Through polling on our social channels, we knew this segment is listening to something while riding transit. There was a clear opportunity to speak directly to them through a podcast.

Strategy Objective:What's the T is TransLink's first official podcast and features host Jawn Jang, a former local radio personality, bringing listeners behind the scenes. We are delivering it through 10-episode seasons centred around a theme. The first season focussed on addressing frequently asked questions such as why SkyTrain doesn't run 24 hours, what we're doing to improve the reliability of our buses and more. The podcast is embedded within our Social Media and digital Content strategy to build and foster a community of knowledge for our customers across different platforms. This marks a transformational change in how we communicate with our customers. We now reach our customers through written, photo, video, and now audio. It humanizes the organization and helps personalize their commuting experience.

Situation Challenge: The saying goes if a tree fell and nobody was there to see it, did it fall? Similarly, if you are doing something and nobody knows about it, are you even doing it? This challenges us to find new ways to reach our customers, stakeholders, and taxpayers on social media and through our digital content. Every day, we strive to build trust and brand affinity with them, demonstrate the value of transit, and distill our priorities into snappy stories. We did this using text, photo, and video through stories on our blog, social media, and YouTube. Over the years, it became abundantly clear to us that we were missing a very important medium: audio to do a deep dive on complex topics such as why doesn't SkyTrain, Vancouver's rapid transit system, operate 24 hours.

Results Impact: Backed by research into comparable public sector podcasts, we set a goal of 450 listens per episode for the first season. We surpassed that — achieving more than 1,300 average downloads per episode and more than 13,000 total downloads across 10 episodes and a trailer. At the time of submission, we're into the second season and lifetime downloads have now surpassed 21,000. The podcast was launched through a media release, social media, employee channels, out-of-home advertising, and word of mouth. It resulted in earned media coverage on two prominent Metro Vancouver publications: an article in the Daily Hive and an interview on The Jas Johal Show on 980 CKNW. Daily Hive is Western Canada's most-read online publication, while CKNW ranks as one of the top-five radio stations in the region.

Why Submit: What's the T represents excellence in strategic communications and marketing in how audience- and data-driven decision-making drives success. Both quantitative and qualitative metrics indicate success. We anchored these conversations around compelling storytelling and creative audio production, while ensuring it was entertaining and educational. Above all, we focussed on what our well-defined audience wanted to know, not what we wanted to tell them. This is a misstep that can often happen even among the most seasoned strategists. It is also an important equity piece as behind-the-scenes content tends to be photos and videos. A rider who is visually impaired was thankful to finally have access to the podcast. The podcast is fully produced in-house, meaning there is no ongoing cost.