BART's Holds Engineering Twitter Town Hall

Target Audience: The target of our hour long "Ask an Engineer" Twitter Town Hall was our 420,000 daily riders of BART, current engineers serving the public at BART, potential new hires, and college engineering students for potential internships.

Strategy Objective:We set out to raise awareness among the public that BART has top-tier engineers in all disciplines and to spread the message that it's a good place for engineers to work, tying our campaign in to the National Engineers Week (#eweek18) observed throughout business and industry. We kicked off the Q&A with pre-made graphics and content designed to provoke comments and questions. We stacked the room with BART engineers and they helped the Communications team provide real-time, high-quality responses. We built a Twitter Moment to archive the Q&A to make it easy to read after the fact. Strategic Messages -BART engineers help keep the Bay Area moving -BART projects are exciting and unique -At BART you'll work with dedicated, knowledgeable and passionate engineers

Situation Challenge: In early 2018, BART had more than 100 engineering jobs open with an urgent need to fill them for a massive infrastructure rebuilding program. The Bay Area is experiencing record low levels of unemployment. Start-up technology companies in Silicon Valley and beyond offer perks from free meals to on-site haircuts, and financial incentives that are attractive to sought-after engineers. We wanted to volley back that BART also is a place for innovation ' not a stuffy government bureaucracy ' by highlighting some of our engineers' exciting projects and to deliver the message we are hiring.

Results Impact: Our Twitter Town Hall earned media coverage in industry trade magazines and created buzz during the event, with more than 100 individual interactions on Twitter. Reactions/sentiment were significantly positive. Our Twitter Moment archive was opened 634 times. Our bart.gov/jobs page that we pointed people to received 1,327 views the day of the Twitter Town Hall. The Communications team also deepened our bench of subject matter experts from our Maintenance and Engineering Department because of this positive experience of working together on this project. They have continued to provide in-depth expertise on engineering-related topics going forward.

Why Submit: This is a strategy with tactics that are easily replicated by transit agencies of any size. We came away with best-practice knowledge that can be shared with our peers. A Twitter Town Hall can be done with a small staff, with a minimal investment of time (one writer did the run-up stories on each discipline in about two days' time), and with a shoestring budget (we provided lunches to our subject matter experts). Instead of asking the public to come to a meeting or recruiting event, we held it virtually and engaged people where they are at. The playbook could be used for any topic.