Celebrating the Public Transit Industry with Transit’s Riders Choice Awards

Target Audience: The primary target audience for this project is transit agencies in the US and Canada. These agencies are looking for ways to celebrate their work both internally and externally. Riders are a secondary target audience as transit agencies share their awards with their riders. This means that copy for the awards need to be easily understood outside of transit industry professionals. Additionally, the awards are great validation for riders that their feedback is being heard by transit agencies.

Strategy Objective:We wanted to highlight the hard work of transit agencies and show riders that agencies were listening to their voices. At the end of 2023 (the first year we ran the awards), Transit's Riders Choice Awards celebrated high performing US and Canadian agencies across various categories, all based on rider feedback gathered in the Transit app. With the Awards, we hoped to celebrate public transit agencies and give them rider-driven recognition that they can use to promote their services. We also wanted to use this initiative to promote Transit's services to agencies in a way that demonstrated the depth and variety of feedback that Transit can gather from riders.

Situation Challenge: Customer feedback is typically expressed through social media, rider hotlines, and "contact us" forms. These methods usually rely on customers initiating contact with the agency, and as a result often focus on negative experiences, with occasional praise for exceptional service. This makes it difficult for transit agencies to measure the vast majority of rider experiences as only the highest highs and the lowest lows are captured. Agencies are seeking additional touchpoints to get a better understanding of the customer experience and hear riders' stories and perspectives. One of the touchpoints is in-app feedback within the Transit app, through quick quarterly surveys and easy opportunities during every trip to report positive, negative, and neutral experiences.

Results Impact: In the 2023 awards we celebrated 22 agencies. Categories reflected elements that impact rider experience like Best Bus Operator, Best Value, Best Communicator, and Most Popular Agency. These concrete, easily understood award descriptions meant that transit agencies could easily share with their staff and riders. Several agencies promoted their wins on LinkedIn and Instagram, VIA Metropolitan Transit (Most Popular Agency winner) published a press release celebrating their victory, and TriMet included their win as a recent achievement in their March 2024 business plan. Transit's own social media posts earned over 50k impressions. Importantly, multiple agencies shared privately with Transit that they had internally celebrated the awards, boosting morale within their organisations.

Why Submit: This entry was submitted because our industry is so often beset by bad news – stories of difficult funding environments, increasing costs, and service challenges abound. The Awards are an opportunity for us to generate some great stories and good press for transit agencies. The enthusiasm from agencies in celebrating their wins demonstrates that the Awards meet a strongly-felt need for good news and recognition. This entry should win because by creating a rider-driven voting system, these Awards carry an increased level of gratification for agencies and integrity for riders. We believe Transit's brand recognition, industry-leading insight into rider experience, and our ability to generate rider feedback uniquely position us to act as a trusted award delegator.