AMSS at the International Urban Traffic Safety Conference
With a last minute cancellation from a speaker, the City of Edmonton asked if we would be able to come present our story and our campaign at their International Urban Traffic Safety Conference. We were incredibly honoured to be asked given we are a brand new society. This showed us the commitment from the City to partner with us and the respect they have for our messaging.
President Liane Langlois and Vice-President Marty Forbes then prepared the layout of how to tell these traffic safety experts about this new initiative. We felt this would be a great time and an even better test audience to preview a couple of our PSAs.
On April 27, we had roughly 40 people attend our session. We first asked how many people rode motorcycles and we were pleased to see more than half the room raised their hand. This meant we knew we were speaking to like minded people who could provide us with some fantastic feedback.
We opened up with the Left Turn commercial. We confirmed some statistics regarding the bad left turn accident and that this is the most pressing issue facing the motorcycle community today. We then dove into the history and the lack of any sort of awareness or safety in the Province of Alberta, until Vision Zero from the City of Edmonton. This was the reason why an organization like the AMSS was desperately needed.
After we spoke about how we came to be, we talked a lot about the support we have received from all forms of media, dealers and the City. By going through each faction of support, we were able to show what each of these groups are doing to get behind us. We played for the audience an example of a personalised PSA created by K97's Todd James who was a victim of a bad left turn last summer in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.
We went into more details about why we started with Left Turn. We acknowledged the many issues that we face with both riders and drivers but again, this accident is what is most common and affects us most. We then explained the We Are campaign and how if people saw us as people and not the small few "problem children", maybe they would care more to watch for us. We finished off by showing one of the We Are commercials that includes the every day person and tagged by one of our media personalities.
The discussion with the entire group after in a Q&A session brought up some great points, undeniable support for our campaign and a lot of thank yous. We found that about 2/3 of our group were law enforcement with a unique perspective on this. They were highly impressed with our approach, especially the We Are were we humanized people and wanted to get involved whether it was on a professional or a personal level.
The end result - more connections made and we opened some doors to new partnerships and experts to help grow our messaging on the many different levels. In our books, that is a success!