DCTA’s Ride Safe Stay Safe Campaign Informs and Educates Passengers on Agency COVID-19 Efforts
Target Audience: The main target audience for this campaign included current and potential DCTA riders, member cities, stakeholders and local partners and organizations.
Strategy Objective:DCTA's Ride Safe, Stay Safe campaign served as the agency's comprehensive COVID-19 educational campaign. The main goals for the campaign included: - Showcasing how DCTA is keeping riders and employees safe - Sharing safety tips when riding transit - Highlighting enhanced cleaning and safety efforts - Keeping riders informed on DCTA COVID-19 news and updates
Situation Challenge: COVID-19 has changed a lot of things — public transit included. However, one thing that remains the same which is DCTA's commitment to safely get people where they need to go. Soon after the onset of COVID-19, DCTA strategically developed and rider and safety campaign – Ride Safe, Stay Safe – to educate people on how the agency was keeping everyone safe, provide tips on how riders and staff could protect themselves, gain insight into rider feedback and more. The main challenges DCTA faced was creating all content and graphics in house; while making sure all information stayed up to date with the ever-changing COVID-19 pandemic. DCTA utilized a variety of tactics including advertising, rider survey, digital marketing, public relations and community outreach.
Results Impact: - Campaign Website – 2,158 page views with 2:23 average time spent on the page; 15th most-viewed webpage during the campaign on RideDCTA.net - System Ridership – Increase in total system ridership every month from June – October 2020 (see wrap up report for exact ridership increase details) - Social Media - Over 480,000 impressions and more than 2,7200 engagements on Twitter and Facebook combined referring traffic to the campaign blog article - Advertising – 424,000 total impressions for digital and print advertising efforts - Email Marketing – 17% average open rate and 2% average click-through rate - Public Relations – Five stories with nearly 84,000 impressions
Why Submit: DCTA found a way to creatively and strategically develop a comprehensive and flexible marcom campaign during the pandemic to properly educate and inform its riders, staff, local partners and stakeholders of everything related to the agency regarding COVID-19. The agency utilized in-house staff to develop and implement a comprehensive campaign that positively highlighted DCTA's COVID-19 response, provided tips on how riders can stay safe, engaged passengers via a survey and had a positive impact on ridership. DCTA's Ride Safe, Stay Safe campaign was a great success, and the agency plans to continue to implement and customize it in 2021.