RideKC Student Pass Pep Rally

Target Audience: The target audience was high school students who will be using the free Student Pass Program. KCATA started the pilot program for ninth through 12th grade students in three school districts. Thousands of students would need to know about the program and how it works. KCATA needed to have a press event to announce the program and to give students and their parents an overview of the program so they would understand how to sign up for and use the free passes.

Strategy Objective:The objective of the Pep Rally Press Conference was to create an event that would encourage high school students to sign up for the program and to entice local media to cover the event. We used social media to help push out photos of the event. We anticipated that students who participated in the pep rally would also post on their social media pages, which would let their followers know about the program. We also wanted a new way to announce that our marketing team offered How-to-Ride trainings for students from each district and for other organizations in the city.

Situation Challenge: We wanted to introduce the program in a unique way that would get the students excited about the free transit passes. With so many students potentially using the passes we needed to make sure that we had media coverage to spread the word about the program. We faced a challenge in communicating the message because we had to work with three different school district administrations to creative a cohesive message and coordinate an event that would reach thousands of students and parents from each district.

Results Impact: The Pep Rally Press Conference produced an immediate impact. The following day, several charter schools reached out to see how they could also receive free passes. Also, our Johnson County transit partner expressed interest in expanding the program to schools in Kansas. We scheduled How-to-Ride trainings with each of the school districts. We anticipate training approximately 100 students from each school district, even though we expect thousands of students from all 12 participating schools to sign up for passes. The largest school district held a competition to see which school could get the most students signed up for passes. Our marketing team went to the winning school to do a How-to-Ride training which extended our social media coverage of the program.

Why Submit: What better way to introduce a new free student pass program for high school students than to host a Pep Rally, complete with a drum line, cheerleaders, games, prizes and after school snacks? The cheer teams and drum line provided an action-packed backdrop for the news media and made the reporters' stories exciting. We wanted the students to be a part of the event so that they could tell their emotional stories about how the free passes would allow them to participate in after-school events, get back and forth to work and to see their family members across town. This event should win an AdWheel award because our team thought outside of the box to deliver our free Student Pass Program announcement in a unique way that got students excited about the program.