Engaging employers to promote sustainable transportation in San Diego County

Over the past two years, Steer Davies Gleave has been supporting the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) to expand the reach of their iCommute Employer Outreach Program.

Back in late 2013, we were tasked with rethinking the program approach and to develop a renewed strategy for connecting with employers across San Diego County to promote alternatives to drive alone commuting.

The new strategy consists of four key elements:

• Pro-active engagement: Steer Davies Gleave provides two additional staff to the iCommute outreach team with a mandate to seek out large employers (200+ employees) and encourage them to participate. The offer includes a fixed amount of direct support, provided as ‘no-fee consulting’, to help set up, implement or expand their commuter program.
• High quality monitoring: significant emphasis was placed on managing employer relationships and collecting commuter survey data from employers. As a result of the new strategy, a customized Salesforce CRM (customer relationship management) called VMR Tracker was developed by Atlanta-based CelWell which enables outreach staff to manage activities, identify new actions, run reports, and view dashboards to track progress against employer and regional goals.
• Behavioral approach to one-to-one interactions: Steer Davies Gleave uses a unique engagement tactic based on motivational interviewing (a behavioral psychology technique) and question-based selling (a successful sales technique by Thomas Freese). The dual-pronged approach provides a clear structure for phone and in-person interactions as well as a convincing position from which to discuss the iCommute program.
• Effective employer recognition: the Diamond Awards recognition program was restructured to reduce SANDAG administration and cost and increase employer motivation to achieve an award. The Awards were revamped as a level-based system (Bronze-to-Platinum) linked to a few key, participation-based criteria. The better the results on each criteria, the higher the award level, as tracked through the Salesforce VMR Tracker.

With Steer Davies Gleave outreach staff in place and additional support provided by our partner Brown Marketing Strategies, the roll-out of the new approach resulted in over 65 employers joining the program in the first year, representing almost 100,000 employees. Over 25% (18 employers) completed a commuter survey and over 10% (8 employers) qualified for a Diamond Award under the new criteria.

With the new approach now closing in on two years in operation, the numbers illustrate the engagement tactics are proving to be effective. iCommute now has over 125 participating employers representing over 240,000 employees, with about 35% (43 employers) completing a commuter survey and 25% (33 employer) achieving a Diamond Award. 

The next steps for iCommute will be to focus on demonstrating the impact of the iCommute program against key criteria such as mode share and vehicle miles traveled, as employers continue to be engaged. With the success of the program thus far, additional outreach staff are being brought on to provide additional capacity to continue to support employers and promote sustainable transportation in the workplace.

Written by Geoff England.