COTA Safe & Secure Campaign - COVID-19
Target Audience: The target audience for COTA's Safe & Secure campaign was composed of our core ridership, those with limited or no access to a vehicle. The majority of our core customers are people of color, and have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. While many members of our community were able to work from home during the pandemic, 85 percent of our customers have jobs that require them to be onsite at their place of employment. Moreover, a significant proportion of these customers have lost hours, pay and, in many cases, their jobs entirely. Our campaign spoke to these essential workers in fields like retail, manufacturing and healthcare who continued to rely on COTA for necessary travel
Strategy Objective:Our marketing materials are inclusive and customer-first, promoting equal mobility and resource access for all customers. The foucs is to lead with empathy toward our customers, treating them with dignity and respect while providing a high-quality transportation experience. We enhanced our customer service team's responsibilities to include managing social media inquiries to alleviate confusion, answer questions and provide peace of mind. From our survey research, we learned that prioritizing the communication of our daily sanitization processes was a key opportunity to reinforce trust in our service. We highlighted these processes in our messaging that detailed the diverse ways in which COTA works to protect our customers from the spread of COVID-19.
Situation Challenge: In response to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed messaging that provides peace of mind to customers reliant on us for transportation. COTA's most active lines during the pandemic are those utilized by essential workers and those connecting to social services. Regardless of socioeconomic or employment status, we believe everyone has the right to clean, safe and reliable transportation – three of the most important attributes expressed by respondents in our customer research studies. Our campaign focused on transparent, widely accessible communication about COTA's enhanced efforts to protect customers from the virus. From cutting-edge sanitization to mask requirements, this campaign demonstrated the ways in which we value and protect our customers' safety.
Results Impact: In the height of Central Ohio's initial lockdowns, COTA ridership dipped to 30 percent of pre-pandemic levels; we lost roughly 70 percent of our customers almost overnight. Despite fears of public transit safety during a pandemic, our ridership is now back to 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Considering that several lines are still suspended, this is substantive progress. Operators often hear messages of gratitude from essential workers who rely on COTA for transportation every day. We also documented a tangible shift in customer sentiment on our social media channels, which we attribute to our transparent approach to communication, both for this campaign and for overall communications.
Why Submit: This entry speaks to COTA's guiding principles: to improve the customer experience, achieve organizational excellence, provide access to mobility options and prioritize the use of data and analytics. This campaign was a victory for the ways in which it was cohesively communicated to and with our target audience. By communicating that public transit is a safe way to travel, we provided access to mobility options for customers who would have been stranded. The Safe & Secure campaign was built on a foundation of strong audience segmentation research to ensure that our message spoke to our core ridership. These principles are grounded in our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion. This campaign positively impacted the customer experience by building trust in the safety of our services.