Spokane Shares the Road
For Spokane County Target Zero Task Force
In this witty traffic-safety campaign, mountain goats rule.
Accidents involving pedestrians and bicyclists were on the rise. We built a narrative-driven safety campaign that’s in a world of its own.
Campaign website
The friendly, accessible Spokane Shares the Road website was unique to our Spokane County audience — and different from any traffic safety information they’d seen before. The site synthesized laws, requirements and safety tips to protect people on the roads. And because more pedestrian and cyclist fatalities were affecting areas where more people spoke Spanish, we created a Spanish-language version of the site alongside the English-language one. A Spanish-speaking team member translated the content, ensuring its tone and humor remained intact.
User experience
We found that most traffic-safety websites in Washington compile a lot of information in one place and let users decide how to interact with it. This created potentially confusing or overwhelming experiences. Spokane Shares the Road presents a linear experience, organizing information as a single narrative. We mapped the narrative to the user’s scroll function on desktop and mobile, so the experience unfolded as they made their way through. Detours offer opportunities to learn more about specific topics. But every path links back to the main road.
Humor and storytelling
Illustrations and graphics throughout the site and other campaign pieces depicted an anthropomorphized animal world. Hidden details on the site surprised and delighted viewers while they learned about safety. To drive engagement and keep people scrolling, annotations hidden throughout the website offered funny commentary.
Print and outdoor pieces
A suite of print and other materials provided information to more people in more places (and drove traffic to the site). We included Spanish and English on all materials, ensuring that our designs reflected the importance of Spanish-language content. The materials included posters and flyers for displaying in stores, restaurants and bus stations; rack cards for events; billboards to remind drivers to share the road; and yard signs for neighborhoods where pedestrian and cyclist safety is a concern. Whenever possible and appropriate, we applied visual treatments that made the text distinct in each language for ease of reading and for balanced visual weight.
Animated video spots
See and Be Seen. Communicate. Stay Alert. We conveyed the three big themes of this campaign in a series of 15- and 30-second animated videos, in Spanish and English. The videos starred our animal characters living in the world we built for them. The videos ran on YouTube and social media, and in movie theaters. The media buy included geotargeting to reach people in Spokane neighborhoods with the highest risk of pedestrian– and cyclist-involved traffic incidents.