Educational Pass Program

Target Audience: The main target audience for COTA's Educational Pass campaign was Columbus City Schools (CCS) students grades 9-12. Our secondary audience included parents and CCS staff. Our tertiary audience was internal within COTA and aimed to educate our whole team with a special focus on Operators.

Strategy Objective:Our strategy was to lean into exciting visuals and authentic storytelling to make transit fun and accessible for high school students. By focusing on the freedom that mobility options bring, this campaign inspires young people to ride public transit to connect to opportunities. To reach students and their families where they are in life, we employed a diverse array of tactics, including a dynamic landing page, instructional toolkits, digital ads, social graphics, audio ads, FAQ resources and print ads.

Situation Challenge: Students are a priority audience for public transportation, but often the entry into public transportation is intimidating to younger people. In order to spark a life-long commitment to transportation, we seized an opportunity to collaborate with the Columbus City Schools (CCS) to address challenges we often have in reaching younger audiences. Together, we created the Educational Pass, which offers all CCS students grades 9-12 unlimited access to COTA's fixed-route services at no charge to students or their guardians. Our challenge was to educate students, guardians and teachers about the Educational Pass and Student Success Cards so that students could make the most of this amazing new opportunity.

Results Impact: Our Educational Pass campaign was a resounding success. Within two months our marketing drove student ridership via this new system from zero to 19,513. Most importantly, we removed barriers to success for these students by providing them an easy, no-cost way to navigate Central Ohio so that they could access libraries, museums, sporting events, rehearsals, internships and each other.

Why Submit: Mobility options are powerful in every stage of life, including a young adult's formative high school years. By taking the initiative to strengthen COTA's partnership with Columbus City Schools (CCS) and Columbus Metropolitan Libraries, we leveraged a collaborative approach to dramatically improve CCS students' mobility options.