GO Transit Safety Campaign

Target Audience: GO Transit is the regional public transit service for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. We carry over 65 million passengers a year. We take pride in offering our passengers safe, fast, reliable, comfortable service to downtown Toronto and other urban centres, whether by train or bus. But sometimes accidents do happen. Our goal for this new marketing campaign was to bring safety awareness to GO riders and the communities we serve. We were looking to make a fundament change to the way customers think about safety, by making them more conscious of their decisions and behavior. What they do throughout their journey impacts their safety and the safety of their fellow passengers.

Strategy Objective:This campaign successfully surpassed all of our marketing performance benchmarks to-date. Our launch event, Collision Course exercise and Rail Safety Week activation received a lot of positive live coverage from over 10+ media outlets ' resulting in over 14 million+ media impressions. Our social media channels garnered positive sentiment, with all our videos receiving a relevance score of 9/10 from Facebook, showing very high resonance with users. And best of all, when comparing 6 months before the campaign launch vs. 6 months after we've seen a 35% increase in call volume to our Transit Safety Dispatch. Our big wins, call volume about suspicious packages has gone up 70%, and trespassing on tracks by 97%.

Situation Challenge: At GO we'd like to see a steady decline in the number of accidents and incidents on the GO Transit system, as we move towards a "zero" culture ' zero accidents and zero incidents. In order to reduce these numbers customers need to know where they can report an accident or incident. Therefore, our call to action this year is to encourage riders or people walking through our stations to call our Safety Dispatch line immediately if they witness or are involved in any of the following types of incidents on our property, including Distress, Vandalism, Medical Emergencies, Disputes, Suspicious Packages, Unsafe or Prohibited Activity and more.

Results Impact: This campaign successfully surpassed all of our marketing performance benchmarks to-date. Our launch event, Collision Course exercise and Rail Safety Week activation received a lot of positive live coverage from over 10+ media outlets ' resulting in over 14 million+ media impressions. Our social media channels garnered positive sentiment, with all our videos receiving a relevance score of 9/10 from Facebook, showing very high resonance with users. And best of all, when comparing 6 months before the campaign launch vs. 6 months after we've seen a 35% increase in call volume to our Transit Safety Dispatch. Our big wins, call volume about suspicious packages has gone up 70%, and trespassing on tracks by 97%.

Why Submit: Safety is a top priority at Metrolinx, demonstrated by: launching the largest safety campaign in GO Transit history and by implementing leading edge initiatives such as our virtual-reality video in partnership with Operation Lifesaver used for Transit Safety customer/community engagement programs. Not only are we doing more to communicate safety to our customers, we are making a real impact on the effectiveness of how customers can report accidents and incidents to our Transit Safety Dispatch. As a result, our Safety & Security team can better investigate these reports, and we continue to work with all our communities, local law enforcement offices, and emergency response services to ensure we have the highest safety practices and standards. Attached: 2 videos, 1 Powerpoint