OKC Streetcar - Streetcar City, Streetcar Safe

Target Audience: The audience for this campaign was broad and three-fold: cyclists, pedestrians and motorists. We aimed to provide safety information for anyone who might live, work or play around the streetcar. We wanted to show how to safely walk, ride and drive around a streetcar or its tracks. Our goal was to reach locals and visitors alike to show that everyone should know how to be streetcar safe in our new streetcar city.

Strategy Objective:Our primary objective was to the educate the public of Oklahoma City of the safe way to walk, ride or drive around the OKC Streetcar. Targeted social media and digital ads were the primary channels for communicating these safety tips because of their targeting and measurement capabilities. To supplement our social media strategy, we reached out to news media, placed exterior wraps on streetcars and the platforms, created parking stickers to be placed on cars along the route and distributed printed safety materials like brochures and coloring sheets at community events.

Situation Challenge: With the coming of the OKC Streetcar and the anticipation for service, EMBARK wanted to make safety the priority of the new transit service with this comprehensive campaign. Gone for over 70 years, streetcars and rail transit is a new and confusing item to many of OKC's residents and learning to drive, ride or walk around the new streetcars was an intimidating task. Messaging was needed to educate the public and clear confusion on how this new system would work. A challenge we wanted to avoid was giving the idea that the new streetcars were unsafe or going to make navigating downtown difficult. Messaging had to be friendly and upbeat, highlighting simply the correct way to interact with a streetcar without inciting other worries.

Results Impact: This campaign created attention in all the right ways, leading to even more earned media coverage. Our social media engagement and following increased dramatically through this campaign and started a conversation about the OKC Streetcar and transit in OKC that we never expected. The following stats represent a 6-month social media campaign: Total Facebook: Impressions: 77,181 Post clicks: 1,112 (clicks to website) Total Twitter Impressions: 166,299 Engagement: 11,581 (clicks to website) Total Video Pre-Roll Impressions: 587,390

Why Submit: "Streetcar City, Streetcar Safe" was an innovative campaign that took on storytelling elements in the creation of safety characters and used unconventional methods of communication that were cost effective and creative. However, most importantly, this campaign took one of EMBARK's core values, Safe Always, to our community. It not only educated our citizens about the coming service but it shared how to live, work and play safely in our growing and modernizing downtown. This campaign is award worthy because it was able to support so many initiatives of our agency. Using a data-driven strategy, staff was able to develop a relevant and result-oriented campaign to bring about awareness of a new service and help our community to live Streetcar Safe.