GoTriangle 'Ready for Rail' Campaign for Commuter Rail Education and Survey Engagement
Target Audience: GoTriangle is the lead agency for a multibillion-dollar commuter rail project that will, if built, connect critical points of the Triangle in North Carolina along a 37-mile corridor. As the project has moved through several study phases, it has fallen off the radar of much of the public. Now that the project is in its last study period before a decision on whether to proceed, public input is imperative, and GoTriangle needed to educate and remind our community about the project and the many benefits it could bring. Our audience was any resident, especially those in under-served communities, within a four-county area willing to catch up on project details and progress and take an online survey about what they were hoping to see in the project.
Strategy Objective:We decided a video of our CEO talking about key project points pushed through multiple social media channels would be key for reminding community members about the commuter rail line and educating new residents about it. The three counties in the Triangle grow by more than 80 people a day, meaning that more than 100,000 people potentially had never heard about the project. We also created an entirely new commuter rail web page and sent emails to over 300 community organizations, more than 5,000 individual subscribers, elected officials and key stakeholders in underserved communities. A print brochure in English and Spanish was delivered to municipalities and community groups along the rail route, including transit centers and a local Community Health Center's COVID-19 testing site.
Situation Challenge: Durham and Wake counties included this commuter rail project in their long-range transit plans in 2016, and two major studies ensued that narrowed down a schedule and route scenario that likely would qualify for federal funds to pay for half of the expected $2 billion cost. During the current phase, project partners hope to agree on an initial concept that includes station locations, new train tracks, bridges, changes to the roadway network, how often the trains would run and train storage and maintenance needs. They also are analyzing the economic and land-use benefits commuter rail would bring to the Triangle and the state. We needed to reeducate taxpayers about the project as it moves through this critical phase and get them to provide input.
Results Impact: We posted our educational video and snippets from it multiple times over a 40-day public engagement period on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. We used the video as a gateway to the survey. On Twitter alone, we received more than 54,000 impressions and more than 2,000 interactions on tweets that included the video or snippets of it. Instagram posts reached more than 2,000 accounts, and Facebook posts reached more than 1,500 people, leading to about 75 engagements. In addition to virtual outreach meetings with community groups and in-person pop-ups, we also distributed hundreds of brochures and surveys. By the end of the period, an unheard-of 2,700 Triangle residents had taken the survey, leading to more than 5,000 comments on the project.
Why Submit: The COVID-19 pandemic and all of its ramifications colored nearly every aspect of life over the year, reducing public transit ridership to essential workers and vulnerable neighbors without cars for many months. Coming up with a way to educate and remind people about a huge transit investment that remained in the study phase and to interest them enough to take a survey seemed a daunting challenge at a time when limited person-to-person contact and no large meetings could be part of the public engagement arsenal. Given the engagement and survey response numbers, this video, print, website and social media campaign surpassed all expectations.