Liftshare Scheme Manager newsletter
Autumn 2013
Your Liftshare Week success! Every year, you do more and more to make Liftshare Week an amazing and successful campaign. And this year has been no exception. Wanting to ensure that everyone has someone to share a car with, we encouraged you to focus on getting more people to add their regular journey – and this year saw a 16% increase on last year. Wow! Many congratulations to all those private schemes who achieved 10 or more new journeys during LSW. And an especially big round of applause for GlaxoSmithKline, whose members added 116 regular journeys over the five days. Sally Biddall (R) from Cardiff University won our LSW prize draw after adding her regular journey. She had 39 potential matches, and won £250 as an added bonus! LSM Peter McDonnell will use the “hand-shake” photo to promote car-sharing in their Sustainability Week. From all those schemes, the lucky LSM who won 100 free myPTP personal travel plans for their organisation was Kathy Ware who helps run Hertfordshire County Council’s staff scheme. Kathy used the intranet and held a coffee morning at County Hall to promote LSW, as well as designing her own posters.
So what worked best?
Road shows Just talking to people face-to-face really helps to boost membership.
Heathrow achieved 44 new journeys in one day whilst Derby Carshare – who launched their scheme via a series of road shows during LSW – got 46 new registrations. Competitions Lots of organisations promoted our competition to win £250 , including Highland Liftshare who saw their 500th member join during LSW. Carshare Cornwall ran their own competition to win a free MOT. A number of schemes, like LN6, gave out free coffee, and Lancashire University enticed staff and students to join by giving away customised air fresheners. Email and Intranet Dundee University sent an email to all 6,099 staff, whilst Cardiff Radio Forth One’s Grant Stott & Dave Connor embarked University created a feature on on the “Tripshare Tour” of Edinburgh on behalf of their intranet advertising half-price Tripshare Sestran to celebrate Liftshare Week. fuel for the LSW competition. Media coverage Lincolnshire, Thurrock and Devon - to name just three - had great coverage in local papers. West Sussex ran a number of radio adverts highlighting the benefits of car-sharing. And there was lots of great Facebook and Twitter activity... All fantastic ideas for next year’s Liftshare Week campaign (6-10 October 2014)!
Best practice
Are you social? Social media is an excellent, free way to engage with members and potential members. Travel Luton and Swindon Travel Choices are always busy on Twitter and Facebook, chatting about a wide variety
ideas to inspire you!
of topics as well as promoting sustainable travel. They use the best approach: sometimes being light-hearted, sometimes being serious. Travel Luton plan to use social media to run a car-sharing campaign in the New Year; they regularly ask members to post pictures of how they travel.
How to make your scheme an immediate success (You don’t need to be launching to use some of these ideas...) Other new schemes since our last newsletter include: o Education (Royal Agricultural University Cirencester) o NHS (Derby Hospitals NHS FT) o Auto (Greatbear BMW) o Business park (Sci-Tech) o Local authority (Leicestershire County Council) o Charity (WWF)
If you’re a social media beginner, why not start by following @Liftshare on Twitter and liking us on Facebook? You could also get some ideas and some content to re-post (like Travel Luton did - see right). For more help, just email the team’s social media guru, helen@liftshare.com. We’ve also set up a Liftshare Managers group on LinkedIn where we’ll be sharing a range of interesting content, so please do join those discussions too.
Babcock Defence Systems Technology - Bristol signed
up 10% of staff on their launch day, despite having no budget to incentivise take-up. Their success was down to great communication and the enthusiasm of the team on the day. Staff were given regular updates before the event (via email, intranet and posters), whilst the event itself was held in the busy reception area. Each time a new member registered, their journey start location was highlighted on a large map so that others could quickly see how many people were travelling from their direction.
npower launched their car-share scheme in August to help
ease the pressure on their Solihull car park as staff merged from the Worcester office. Their aim was to sign up 10% of their 700 staff (who drive) - and they have now registered 30%. They achieved this with a successful marketing launch event, using a registration lottery to win £50 vouchers. They also have dedicated parking spaces for car-sharers based on the ground floor of their car park.
Vodafone’s clever idea Vodafone’s sustainability event in June attracted over 620 employees from across the site. There were stands from Liftshare, Thames Water, BMW, Halfords as well as a charity barbecue. To ensure that staff visited all of the stands,
Vodafone had a clever idea: they handed out quiz cards to those who attended the event, containing questions about each stand. Every correctly completed quiz card was then entered into a prize draw. By the end of the day, their scheme had 61 new members.
Now you can share your Liftshare resources with colleagues Our Additional Monitoring Pages Logins (AMPLs) will help provide your manager, green champions and other relevant colleagues with additional free access to your scheme’s monitoring pages.
What do your members really think? This summer we carried out a member survey. Below is a brief summary of responses to two of the questions; for more details, please email meleiha@liftshare.com.
As well as the dedicated Liftshare Scheme Manager (that’s you!), successful schemes often have a network of enthusiastic champions supporting them. With AMPLs, these colleagues’ departments (e.g. Communications, HR and/or Senior Management) can now help with the day-to-day running of the scheme. This helps you with promoting car-sharing, as well as monitoring activity, producing reports and dealing with member queries. It is also useful for any LSMs who are on annual leave or wish to share the information regarding the car-share scheme with other members of their team. The new AMPLs will be going live by Christmas! Would they be useful to you? Register your interest today by calling Liftshare client account management team on 01603 389321 or emailing customersupport@liftshare.com
Tip: we suggest you sometimes focus on potential members impacted by these public transport and parking.
Show colleagues how to access your Monitoring Pages
Tip: it’s clearly worth setting up and publicising a Guaranteed Ride Home scheme! We can tell you more about it.
Would you like to win an iPad for Christmas? Well now you can... simply refer Liftshare to your supply chain and you may WIN! Liftshare’s goal is to ensure everyone has someone to share a car with. And one successful way we’ve found to grow our network is through businesses encouraging them to promote car-sharing to their supply chain.
Do you work with any organisations which could benefit from car-sharing? As long as they have over 300 staff at a single site, we can help them. All you need to do is email jemma@liftshare.com with a relevant name and telephone number, and we’ll do the rest. In return we’ll enter you in our prize draw to win an iPad. Full terms and conditions: http://blog.liftshare.com/uncategorized/tcs The closing date for entries is 1 December 2013. Good luck!
IT noticeboard
You’ll know we’ve simplified the process of creating BUDi teams. Maximising the usability of every Liftshare site is always our focus, and further improvements over the coming months will include: • simplifying the activation process • re-designing our automated emails and introducing some helpful new ones to keep members engaged • improving social media integration • creating a new mobile app
Some important updates you need to be aware of
We’re abso lutely com mitted to provid ing you w ith continuo u s s e r v i c e improvem ent, and we’re currently working o n series of p rojects wh a will furth ich er improv e the usability of your car-shari ng websit e ...
Big myPTP news! There have been two very exciting developments in the UK’s ground-breaking personal travel planning tool: • Liftshare’s myPTP is the only journey planning tool on the market to offer information on door-to-door Park-and-Ride journeys as a distinct option... As a result, myPTP has become a key component of Norfolk County Council’s Better Buses bid in helping them meet
Anticipating the increase in traffic, we upgraded our servers in time for Liftshare Week, so - as the network’s membership continues to grow - we are still capable of handling even more user activity at any one time. For best practice reasons – we no longer support Internet Explorer 6 (see Summer newsletter). Anyone still using the very first version of IE6 may now get security warnings when they try to access their Liftshare scheme. If you still use IE6, we’d advise you to apply all available security updates or (ideally) upgrade to a modern browser. We’re also introducing a new tool for member feedback, to drive further developments. Lots of exciting news to follow...
their objective to market the many Parkand-Ride options available to individuals in the city of Norwich. • the ability to automatically survey individuals to discover if they have changed their travel patterns... myPTP now has a set of surveys that will be sent out automatically to myPTP recipients two weeks (and then three months) after they first receive their travel plan. The short survey collates information to identify a modal baseline of transport behaviour and judges the effectiveness of myPTP to lead people to reconsider their journey methods. The survey assesses whether people have consequently changed their behaviour, describes what the change is and reveals barriers to change through understanding people’s reasoning. For more information or to request a demonstration, please contact James Creed: james@liftshare.com or call 01603 389321.
Our (slightly early)
Christmas wishes We have loved working with you this year. Your enthusiasm, ideas and campaigns - along with the many visits we’ve made have kept us busy and buzzing! Everyone involved in promoting lift-sharing this year has been a part of a huge and growing - phenomenon. Sharing is becoming bigger and more important than ever... This year, around 60,000 new members will have joined the Liftshare network, and over 70,000 new journeys will have been added for sharing. We look forward to another great year ahead. And we’d like to take this opportunity to wish you a very happy Christmas, and a healthy, joyful 2014.
Remember - if you have any comments or suggestions for what you’d like to see in a future newsletter, or you want to see your success story in print, please do drop a line to cecilia@liftshare.com