GoTriangle Youth GoPass - Campaign to Increase Ridership

Target Audience: In 2018 as part of the Wake Transit Work Plan it was proposed that a fare free option would be offered to youth 13-18 on three area transit agencies, GoRaleigh, GoCary and GoTriangle. Once approved, GoTriangle was tasked with the marketing aspect of the program. The marketing efforts needed to target both parents of teens as well as the teens themselves. GoTriangle was responsible for creating and executing the marketing plan.

Strategy Objective:Once the partnerships were established we needed to create a comprehensive set of materials. These materials included an application, brochure, bus placards, door hangers, posters, social media posts and videos. All documents attached. Through these pieces we would reach teens and their parents/guardians by placing them on the buses, promoting through facebook, instagram, youtube and twitter, back to school outreach events and more.

Situation Challenge: To reach the teenager and parent of teenager we needed to focus on getting in front of them in places where they frequent. We focused our efforts on libraries, public schools, health and human services centers, parks and recreation and of course made our transit centers a distribution point as well. Each location was trained to provide information and to sign up teens and provide them with an active Youth GoPass. A database was built to track passes given and to allow us to alert the teen as they approach their 18th birthday (when the pass would expire) and offer then options about how to continue using transit.

Results Impact: Due to our comprehensive marketing efforts, within 3 months there have been over 3200 Youth GoPasses distributed to youth in the Triangle with more signing up daily. Total Youth GoPass boardings are over 25,000 with over 871 unique GoPasses in use. Since inception a fourth agency, GoDurham, also come on board to mirror the other agencies efforts and we continue to increase the number of distribution centers which now include wake, durham and orange county libraries, area transit a health and human services centers. Through our promotions on social media we were able to reach over 240,000 members of the community with our 2nd video (GoTriangle Youth GoPass Adrian Video)

Why Submit: Looking at creative ways to increase ridership long term can be difficult. Taking on the creating of the free Youth GoPass allows us to create greater awareness around a group of riders who will be making commuting decisions over the next 10 years of their teenage and early adult and working life. The partnerships that we made will not only allow us to get Youth GoPasses into the hands of teens, but will allow us the opportunity to continue educating this group on how to use transit. It will also allow us the ability to survey a group that had previously been untapped. We're excited about the results we've seen in the first 3 months and look forward to continuing that success.