Beyond Bike to Work Day, How Google Is Expanding TDM Programs

Featured Recipe – Google’s Recipe for a Successful Bike to Work Campaign

(With so much great content and so many awesome ideas we couldn’t quite hold ourselves to 30 minutes this time!)

Platform Highlight – Customizable Dashboards
(Start- 4:11)

Grant Heger, RideAmigos Director of Client Services, gets us started with an overview of some options for customizing user dashboards in RideAmigos. Depending on your organization’s particular needs you may want more emphasis on trip logging, ridesharing, or incentives. Multiple dashboards are also an option. Let RideAmigos know how we can help customize your dashboard(s) to best optimize our platform for your goals and needs.

Main Presentation – Google Bike Month 2016
(4:12 – 25:38)

Lucy Tice, Program Manager for TDM at Google, shares about Google’s success expanding from a one-day Bike to Work event to an entire Bike Month celebration and competition with the help of RideAmigos.

Market Segmentation – In preparing for Bike Month, Google identified four different types of bikers: strong & fearless, enthused & confident, interested but concerned, and no way no how. Their main focus was on enthused and confident and interested but concerned, which comprised 60% of their population. Looking at this target audience they recognized how to leverage programming and incentives to involve these two groups in numerous ways.

Among the programs used to connect with the interested but concerned were awareness and resource information, learning workshops, group rides, route guidance, and a “bike buddy” system.

Using RideAmigos – Google used RideAmigos for trip tracking, incentives, and prize awarding. A large focus was placed on building interest and buzz beforehand. Approximately 2,500 Googlers participated in Bike to Work day in 2016. Their reward system was designed to both generate interest beforehand, on Bike to Work day, and throughout the month. For every trip

Statistics 

• 20 day challenge
• 870 participants in challenge program
• Most trips logged by a Googler: 72
• Most miles logged by a Googler: 882
• Over $7,000 worth of prizes raffled, mostly donated by vendors who participated in BTWD
• 200 prizes distributed, 23% of participants received some kind of prize
• Cars off the road in May (total trips logged): 15,714
• Over 400 joined RideAmigos within a week
• Over 2,500 joined after B2W challenge
• 40k Alternative trips logged
• 250k alternative miles logged
• 10k calories burned
• 92 tons of CO₂ reduced.

Successes and Lessons – People love prizes! Great to have prizes donated by local vendors, increases excitement. Allows this to be a relatively low-cost program. Leveraging Bike to Work Day as part of a larger movement helps generate interest. Early prize winners help create more buzz. More time for promotion could lead to more participation. Lots of opportunity to add new team elements, including team prizes. In the future Google plans to do more raffle-style prizes earlier on in future campaigns.

Q&A (25:39 – 36:53)

Q: How do you identify different types of market segments
A: Employee surveys, mailing lists, Google groups.

Q: How important is the time of the year? California has relatively good weather all year.
A: Great weather does make a difference, but in other states people are still committed to biking!

Q: Did you also include multi-modal trips?
A: Yes, if part of their trip was by bike they could log it in RideAmigos. One-way trips were also allowed, but ONLY bike trips were counted toward this challenge.

Q: How do you make sure people are continuously motivated and engaged?
A: Now that the monthlong challenge is ended Google is continuing to use the RideAmigos platform to incentivize smarter commuting. They have prizes that are only available to those participating in this program.

Q: Google has a lot of locations. Were you obligated to apply this program to all of them?
A: This was a Bay-area only challenge. Google was very transparent in letting employees know that these challenges are meant to address particular issues of parking, trafffic, etc. Transparency seems key in helping folks understand the limited scope of this challenge.

Q: Did you have a landing page to explain the challenge?
A: Yes! A full introduction, FAQ and easy “join” button were all provided.

Q: Did you create the “Bike Buddy” program using RideAmigos”
A: No, it was done manually, but RideAmigos has recently released a new bikepool module that is available

Q: Are you planning to use RideAmigos for other modes?
A: Yes! Running a carpool promotion right now and integrating further with RideAmigos.

Q: What did you do to regulate bike teams?
A: Not much. They were primarily an add-on to the individual challenge. In the future teams will be a more integral, planned part of the challenge.

After-conversations (36:54 – End)

Stay on the line to hear some great conversations between various RideAmigos Academy members sharing their thoughts and ideas for bike to work campaigns.