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How to Be an Influencer With Your Stories
- 1. National League of Cities’ Creative Transportation in Cities of All Sizes: How to Be an Influencer With Your Stories
- 2. Local governments can and should be: 1.Their own media, and 2.Hyper collaborative with their community.
- 8. Influencing Policy and Planners
- 9. A Roadmap to Storytelling That Won’t Break the Bank • Compelling websites sell a lifestyle • Pick your social networks wisely • Find free contributors to help • Engage at events or hackathons • Engage thought leaders • Tell stories from research and data • Create locally and nationally relevant messages and talking points • Use great photos – always • Make grass-roots calls to action • Hire a journalist
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Howard has discussed things like equity and making traffic bearable that government should be good at. That’s their rightful place and role. What I’m going to talk about is something that the private sector, increasingly businesses, are good at and getting better at. The mainstream media has been good at some elements of it for a very long time.
- Local governments can and should be: Their own media, and Hyper collaborative with their community. What does this mean? Let me talk about what Mobility Lab has done.
- Mobility Lab is based in Arlington, Virginia and is a project of Arlington County Commuter Services. This is just a small division that’s part of the transportation department, which is part of the environmental department. It doesn’t seem like there would be resources to have a media and research company, does it? But Arlington was smart about 5-6 years ago. It wanted to get better at making its research about the incredible transportation work it had done be more accessible to the public. That home became Mobility Lab. A couple of years after that, about four years ago, Arlington wanted to start telling stories about the research, to make it even more accessible to the public. Those stories would be all about what makes Arlington special. Forty years ago, the county was an industrial, ugly, pass-through from the Virginia suburbs into Washington D.C. Arlington made important decisions to build Metro underground along a corridor that was not alongside Interstate 66. That gave the corridor room to breathe and grow for a completely walkable, bikable five-mile stretch from the Potomac River at Rosslyn to the Ballston neighborhood. This corridor development has made Arlington famous, and Mobility Lab is a way to communicate that success to others and also bring back the success of others so Arlington knows about it and can learn and continue to grow.
- So we built a media site because we identified that nobody else had a good website completely dedicated to the very specific topic that Arlington is great at. The corridor was built, but the key was to getting people to continue using the transportation services offered. Tons of other non-profits, companies, and media are focused on transportation infrastructure and technology, but we wanted to focus on getting people to use transit.
- We think we have been very successful, rapidly growing followers on Twitter, through our newsletters, and at our website. There’s been a big media-relations push as part of it as well. We came up with our central messages and talking points, and have constantly worked to refine and update those. This work has led us to become national transportation experts, getting quotes everywhere from WIRED to USA Today to NPR to all kinds of transportation trade publications. Podcasts, Videos, Social Media Twitter, Newsletter 100+ contributors, grass roots, people love this topic and you can give them a voice. You have a duty to give them a voice. Stop being afraid of what people will say and embrace what they say.
- And we’re not just aiming to influence the media, which of course in turn influences policymakers, business leaders, and the public. Our Transportation Techies group started from scratch less than a year-and-a-half ago and now has 1,400 members. This is D.C.-only group. There are somehow 1,400 Transportation Techies in this town. I suspect other places would be similar. This group meets monthly to have a show-and-tell of the best hacking, big-data storytelling, and other innovations in this space.
- And the Techies have influenced perhaps their biggest target: WMATA Metro, which runs buses and the subway here. The first Techies event ever held at WMATA HQ just happened. The Washington Post wrote two features about it. And people are going to eventually benefit from the Techies’ work in helping open data in order to tell better stories and get trains and buses running more dependably.
- We run a thing called TransportationCamp that happens every January in Arlington. About 400 attended this year, and these attendees consist of transit industry folks, but also of enthusiasts, and to see the two come together is heartening. People outside the inner circles of power have a chance to influence policy and planning, and they are doing it at this unconference, which is now expanding to happen all over the country and world. Any of you can organize them in your hometowns, and Mobility Lab will help.
- Don’t jump into all this without a plan, a vision, a strategy, and something you are sure you can do better than anyone else. Don’t give people reasons to leave you for your competitors. Be valuable and the rest will take care of itself. So how to do all of this? Take after Arlington and Mobility Lab.