Federal Way Light Rail Extension Virtual Groundbreaking
Target Audience: Our audience was three-fold, primarily focusing on the communities surrounding the project site and who will greatly benefit from access to a fast, congestion-free ride to jobs, schools, and recreational facilities in a few short years. Our secondary audience focused on the elected officials and community leaders who have been involved in making this light rail extension a reality for years. We wanted to make sure they had an outlet to voice their support and celebrate the service, which has been a long time coming. Lastly, we created an interesting virtual groundbreaking for our local media, who would want to share the major progress on a public benefit project with their readers and viewers.
Strategy Objective:Our objective was to generate excitement around the project's progress, show off the benefits of transit, and to show our commitment to economic recovery in the region in a positive and hopeful way. We were strategic in delivering this message to the public during a pandemic, making sure we didn't just bring awareness to the project but, for our primary target audience, showed them our commitment to making this project and the community thrive. This was done by balancing the politicians speaking with community members, showing sites instantly recognizable to the people who actually live in those communities, and reinforcing our investment in them and their future.
Situation Challenge: With the world changing due to COVID-19, a typical in-person groundbreaking event just wasn't possible. So our team pivoted to develop an agency's first virtual groundbreaking to celebrate the start of construction on the Federal Way Link Extension and honor our stakeholders and delegates' role in the project, including the federal partnerships that enabled this project to move forward. We also wanted to assure the community that although many activities were brought to a standstill, construction on this vital project was moving forward and that we all had a bright future to look forward to despite COVID.
Results Impact: Awareness of the Federal Way Link Extension project went through the roof after our virtual groundbreaking. In the two weeks after distribution, our paid Facebook post which was our main promotional tactic, received 82,144 views and 2,464 clicks, resulting in a $.12 cost per click. Considering a good cost per click for our industry is under $1.00, our virtual groundbreaking was extremely successful. Since then, the video itself has had 6,199 views! It also got an incredible amount of positive media coverage. One local newspaper that's known to be critical of our projects went as far as writing an article titled "This two and a half minute video about Sound Transit's plans to expand light rail to Federal Way just moved me to tears at my desk."
Why Submit: In a pandemic lockdown, how do you create an event that typically takes place onsite? How do you capture remarks from 11 politicians from federal, state, and local levels of government and an additional 8 stakeholders and community members in a COVID-safe and responsible way? How do you make speaking notes from 19 different people exciting and inspiring? Those were just a few of the challenges we faced in creating our first-ever, virtual groundbreaking ceremony. This video took an immense amount of coordination, collaboration, and creative problem-solving, and did so with no previous "roadmap" to guide us. In the end, we paved the way for future groundbreaking events.