Trapeze Group launched Transit Unplugged to enable transit enthusiasts to hear from those that were previously inaccessible to them: North America's transit C-suite.

Target Audience: Our target audience are individuals in the public transit industry who want to hear directly from the top CXOs in our business and why the CXOs think transit mobility has the potential to revolutionize our cities and communities for the betterment of our riders. We decided to put it on all major podcast platforms (Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, etc.) to give it the broadest reach and provide the easiest access possible.

Strategy Objective:To facilitate learning from the top leaders to give the industry ideas on how to approach similar issues, and to further the discussion of future transit trends helping us prepare for what to expect for tomorrow's mobility paradigm. Listening to Transit Unplugged provides an avenue to reach out and start discussions so you can learn what others are doing and be inspired to improve your piece of transit.

Situation Challenge: Sharing is hard. Our industry leaders are constantly busy. And because of that, they don't often get time to share their knowledge. The need and desire to learn from one another is rampant in our industry. People crave new ideas, technologies, and strategies. But it isn't always easy in a conference setting or through an industry publication ' people can't attend, don't get the opportunity to speak, and they can't read every publication. We saw an opportunity to give top industry leaders another avenue to voice their knowledge ' knowledge that comes from challenges they are facing or have already overcome ' and share what matters most to them, unfiltered and unplugged.

Results Impact: Transit Unplugged had a successful launch on Nov 15, 2017, with two episodes, and a multi-channel marketing approach: a blog, a social campaign, and a press release (which got picked up by two industry publications ' Mass Transit and CUTA). The average podcast episode download is ~200 per episode. Our first episodes quickly surpassed this average. We currently get an average of 376 unique downloads per episode with total unique downloads for the show currently sitting at 10,027. In late August 2018, we launched an e-mail subscription for the podcast. Within 3 months, we already have 53 number of subscribers. In addition to industry publications, agencies are sharing and engaging with episodes on their social channels as well as transit enthusiasts discussing issues raised in the podcast.

Why Submit: "What does it mean to be a successful public transit agency? What are you doing to lead the way? It's time to learn from the top transit professionals in North America." That's the intro to our podcast, Transit Unplugged. It strives to push the education of the public transit industry forward. And with the feedback we've received and the popularity of the episodes in a niche market, we can see that Transit Unplugged is making a difference and enabling others to think differently about public transit.