Bicycle Transportation Alliance: Bike Commute Challenge campaign

The Portland Bicycle Transportation Alliance's annual Bike Commute Challenge is a friendly competition — workplace against workplace — with benefits for companies and individual cyclists when employees bike to work in the Portland, OR area during the month of September.

Concept, illustration, poster design, website re-skin and banners done pro-bono for the BTA's 2011 Bike Commute Challenge.

PROBLEM:

The Portland Bicycle Transportation Alliance needed a multi-channel campaign to support the 2011 Portland Bike Commute Challenge. They asked me—a soon-to-be Portland resident, working remotely with PDX teams from my home in Washington, DC—to help them with a campaign concept, illustration, posters, digital ads and a website re-skin.

What is the Bike Commute Challenge? "Since 1995, the BTA has offered challenges – and rewards – to bikers and businesses when they bike to work. The BTA’s annual Bike Commute Challenge is a friendly competition — workplace against workplace — with benefits for companies and individual cyclists when employees bike to work during the month of September. The workplaces with the highest percentage of commutes by bicycle during the month win!"

MY ROLE:

Creative Lead & design-team-of-one. I was responsible for brainstorming the campaign concept, visual design for a multisurface campaign (including posters, website and ad banners), illustration, writing copy, and delivering assets to & coordinating with the volunteer web developer to update the BCC website.

PROCESS:

After interviewing folks from BTA and determining their needs for the campaign, I started by pitching a variety of illustration concepts for the BCC poster—the focal point of the campaign. Once we locked that down, I iterated and delivered a polished poster in time for our printing deadline and moved on to applying that motif to the existing BCC website. I worked with Metaphor Lab to re-skin and enhance the functionality of the existing website. Last, I created promotional web banners to run on KGW.com and Portland Mercury.com.

The website launched and opened for registration in August 2011. The launch was supported with a multi-media campaign promoting the program and encouraging folks to log their progress on the website: Email blasts were sent out to previous participants and BTA members to announce the opening. Later that month, the posters were mailed out to 12,000 individuals at businesses, non-profits, and public organizations across Oregon and SW Washington.

RESULT:

The BTA's 2011 Bike Commute Challenge broke all previous records: More than 12,000 individual riders from 1,450 workplaces teams in Oregon and SW Washington participated. Together, participants logged over 1,360,000 miles of bike commuting. More than 2,000 participants identified themselves as new bike commuters.

Credits: Bicycle Transportation Alliance branding & Bike Commute Challenge logo by NORTH.
Original site by Web Collective and Grapheon. Many thanks to Metaphor Lab for website development.
Thanks to Pac/West and KGW for additional Flash banner ad work.