RideKC Election Day Campaign

Target Audience: The target audience for the Election Day Free Rides was broad. We wanted to engage people who would ride transit to the polls, but we also wanted to reach to reach area citizens, elected officials and civically minded citizens to show our support for civic engagement and participation in voting.

Strategy Objective:Following the social media spike we saw in August, RideKC decided to announce free rides earlier for the November election. That would allow us to maximize the impact on social media and include messaging about registering to vote and planning a trip to the polls. Instead of a few days of civic pride, we were able to string out the messaging over a month, giving local governments, citizens and politicians a chance to help us spread our message. We create a "Vote and Ride Guide" with basic information for voters in Kansas and Missouri, and included the basics of how to ride. This guide was used on social media by community activists, candidates and local governments. It was created as a printable resource available our blog, and transferred well to social media use.

Situation Challenge: On Election Days in Nov. 2016, Nov. 2017, April 2017, and Aug. 2018, RideKC offered free rides in order to remove barriers to voting. The announcement of the free fares was typically made within a week of the election. Our challenge was to maximize the social reach of our voting messages by optimizing the timing and messaging of social media posts, and to create a measurable increase in ridership on Election Day.

Results Impact: The campaign yielded great results. Ridership on Election Day was up 11.91% percent over the previous week, from 42,208 to 47,236. We were able to leverage our message to reach people frequently and with a variety of messages. We focused our efforts on Twitter, our strongest social media network, but we also had good engagement and sharing on Facebook. On Twitter, we were able to increase our impressions on election messages by more than 23%, from 146,794 in August to 181,033 for November. As of August 2018, our most popular tweet had 89,000 impressions. By building up our campaign, we managed 115,000 impressions with our biggest November election tweet. Our combined impressions from Twitter and Facebook grew more than 30%, from 148,735 to 194,213.

Why Submit: The free rides for elections on is something that RideKC is very proud of. We could not offer these free rides without the support from local jurisdictions. Civic engagement and citizen participation leads to better, more inclusive communities where people are connected to one another. We succeeded in getting more people on the bus, and we also shared the message that we support civic engagement and RideKC wants to remove barriers to voting.