Offering an interactive experience to bike the community, by exploiting the online portal providing important information about bike paths and lines.
BA.cykloportal offers a combination of an interactive map of bike paths
in the Bratislava self-governing region and a new communication
channel of the municipality to reach the population interested in biking.
One of the main reasons for implementing such practise was a
communication gap between the municipality and the target segment.
The citizens and visitors interested in the recreational or professional
biking were not sufficiently informed about the current bike paths
infrastructure or about the activities of the municipality aimed to help
them.
The basic marketing communication channels used by the municipalities in Slovakia are often overlooked by the citizens because they are perceived as boring or badly targeted. So, the municipality utilized the initiative of the civil association called Slovak bicycle club and partner with them to add the Bratislava region on the Cykloportal platform.
The portal provides high resolution, interactive maps of bike paths in the region and gives the municipality the opportunity to directly engage the biking community, as they can plan their trip on the portal and download the map into the smartphone. The news and calendar section inform the viewers about the newest steps of the municipality to improve the bike infrastructure or about the events taking place, which can be found on http://ba.cykloportal.sk/kalendar. This way the communication isn’t lost in the vast amount of municipality news not concerning biking.
Resources needed
Bratislava self-governing region paid the association 4896.00 € for the establishment of the portal. Also, human resources were needed to check the bike paths and lanes and make visual documentation to make the map interactive.
Evidence of success
When the budget of the project is taken into consideration, the results of the practice are quite interesting. Since the launch of the project in June the views of all the bike paths and lanes in the region together are in thousands and the most popular one alone was viewed almost a thousand times.
Difficulties encountered
Some members of the public criticized that the region around the capital city is a follower and not the leader and innovator when it comes to the project.
Potential for learning or transfer
Subjects trying to reach a target segment who is currently insufficiently following their basic communication channels can learn a lot from this practice. Especially when the target segment represents a very clearly defined niche.
While citizens often ignore news from their municipality, they actively search for information they care about and are passionate about. Public institutions should look for potential partners who already have an active relationship with the target audience. Also, the municipality saved a lot of resources by transferring most of the responsibility on the association. This way they didn’t have to create they own website from a scratch but could use the already established and tested Cykloportal platform. Bratislava region also wasn’t the first to use the Cykloportal platform and had the possibility to learn from the mistakes of previous regions.
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Tags: Environment, Low-carbon, Community, Communication, Cycling, Landscape
