Get On Board BRT: Montgomery County's Bus Rapid Transit Educational Campaign

Target Audience: All residents/commuters in Montgomery County, Maryland; anyone who wants to get where they're going in the County ' quickly.

Strategy Objective:The objective was for the community to learn about this new transit project and to ultimately support (or "get on board") with the plans. MCDOT, supported by Clark Concepts, LLC, developed an extensive educational outreach and communications campaign to inform the local community about the benefits of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), and generate excitement about what this new form of transit will bring to the area. An important part of the process was to take complicated information and bring it down into material that was easy to understand. This program includes a comprehensive marketing plan/strategy, messaging, original graphics, an informational website, and many other elements ' all of which are designed to ensure a clear and consistent message.

Situation Challenge: A new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system is being developed for Montgomery County, Maryland. This is a completely new transit service for this area; the first BRT in Maryland. The need was for an extensive, integrated, marketing campaign that would engage the community with a twofold approach: educating the community on what BRT is, and informing them on specifics regarding the local BRT projects. Information would need to be simple, engaging, fun, and easy to understand in order to pique the interest of the community and effectively engage with them.

Results Impact: In line with the objectives, this campaign has resulted in more community awareness and support of the project. As this is a "from scratch" campaign, we were able to grow a following from a few residents to several thousand. Highlights from last year's campaign are listed in our 2017 Outreach Summary. Some highlights include 25,400 new visitors to the website, 53,400 page views for specific project pages. Hundreds of residents have signed up to receive email alerts and connecting on social media. Open houses and other public meetings resulted in more widespread awareness of the project and garnered support. Due to strong public support, our first BRT line was fully funded this year and is scheduled to begin service in 2020.

Why Submit: This entry was submitted because it's an effective communications campaign that was developed and executed successfully and is achieving desired results. Because this is not a pre-existing program or project, everything had to be developed from scratch. It's a "soup to nuts" example of a fully integrated educational campaign with every possible component included. All audiences were identified and targeted in a creative way. Other jurisdictions have contacted us for information on what and how we produced this program and have used our communications effort as an example in BRT programs they're putting together. If other entities are using elements of this campaign to start from when building their BRT educational programs, it must be award-worthy.