Project Brief
As part of the rollout of the Coast Bike Share St. Pete Program a thorough public engagement process was developed to ensure the program was set to operate at its maximum potential at launch. The outreach campaign targeted residents and businesses to help promote the program early on. To effectively reach the maximum number of community members representing a diverse demographic many channels were required to build the bike share system.
Objective
Starting off the engagement and charret outreach process, my objective and challenge was clear: assemble enough stakeholders and community input for the successful design and launch of the active mobility program. Building off of my previous experience, I determined that the best way to quickly target as many as possible would be to reach out to business associations and neighborhood groups, as the entire population of downtown St. Petersburg was our stakeholder group. Second, the existing cycling community would be of tremendous benefit as early adopters, hopefully being able to show the value of our program to non-cycling friends and family. Finally, two age groups would be specifically targeted, millennials and empty nesters as they’re the core of bike share users in urban areas, while still making an effort to reach those outside of those two generational labels.
Strategy
For this outreach effort to be successful, measured by the number of folks engaged and the level of their engagement, I determined there needed to be as many touchpoints with each involved stakeholder as possible. This ensured that the stakeholder felt their input was valuable as the project served as more of a conversation than a one-time opinion. More importantly, it began the sales funnel that would end in Founding Membership sales at the end of summer. With that, I chose many channels to reach as many as possible, including social media, email marketing, in-person meetings, public events, traditional press, and demographic-specific media partnerships (blogs, newsletters, culture magazines, etc).
Tactics
There were a number of public phases across the 90-day outreach and engagement period. Each element was spaced about two weeks apart to stay relevant and was accompanied by a push through a number of the channels mentioned previously:
- Public kickoff meeting held alongside city staff
- General survey on what users would expect of a bike share system
- A station suggestion website
- Business Association and Neighborhood Group presentations (throughout)
- A public charrette meeting, creating a number of sample system maps.
- Door-to-door engagement with neighboring businesses and residents of potential hub locations.
- Final mini-charrette, narrowing down the top 50 locations to the final 30 or thereabouts.
Of these phases, one of the more beneficial, albeit with two smaller yet well-connected groups, was the first public charrette. Knowing that you cannot satisfy everyone, nor can you think of everything by yourself, I grouped attendees, tasking each to create their own ideal bike share system. Bike share, like any transportation, works well when the place a population lives, works, and plays are all accessible. For that reason, I gave each group thirty colored dots, ten of each location genre, and they were expected to complete their system after a quick best practice overview.
This workshop accomplished the two things I set out to see. First, it showed the public how incredibly difficult it is to build a system attempting to cater to the most possible people. Just minutes into the exercise frustrations could be heard around the rooms as attendees inventory quickly dwindled. Second, by overlaying all of the maps created, it provided me with a thematic heatmap ensuring our data-driven site selection process done behind the scenes was accurate. In the end, we did alter a few locations with the new data.
Outcome
Following the 90-day outreach and engagement process, I achieved hundreds of thousands of impressions through social media posts, digital ads, as well as traditional media spots. I spoke with thousands of residents and business leaders across the City of St. Petersburg, confirming the system was designed optimally ahead of launch.
