Boulder’s Walk & Bike Month

In many places, walking or riding a bike as part of your commute falls somewhere between novel and impossible. In Boulder, pedestrian culture is a way of life. But Walk and Bike Month, the city’s annual celebration of walking and cycling, doesn’t happen on its own. Our friends who organize Walk & Bike Month put on almost 100 activities each June, culminating in Bike to Work Day on the fourth Wednesday of the month. They needed help promoting their activities, placing news about their cause in local media and using social media to alert their supporters to what’s happening.

Tactics:

• Pivot created an extensive media relations campaign that focused on reaching local beat reporters, regional feature writers, broadcast media and even national publications looking to see what is going on with growing bike-friendly trends.
• We supported Walk & Bike Month organizers by developing an aggressive email campaign that highlights each week’s events and always reminded readers to register for Bike to Work Day, held toward the end of the month’s festivities.
• We developed a social media campaign to keep the pressure on for attendance to events and registration.
• We creatively targeted various beat reporters – fashion, food, exercise, political, history, senior, parent, and children related – to expand the media coverage possibilities.

Results:

Our efforts over three years have generated tremendous media coverage, a huge spike in event registration from participants in the annual Bike to Work Day, and a tremendous outpouring of interest and financial support from sponsors, who now fund a majority of the city’s Walk & Bike month activities.

Feedback:

“Pivot has transformed the media and outreach component of our program and has gotten us more press coverage in the last two years than any other time in the program’s 30-plus years. The Pivot team was great to work with. A number of their campaign ideas and projects added greatly to the profile and value of our program. The materials they produced were well-written and professional. They stayed well within budget and produced clear, useful reports throughout the project. They were always responsive.”

- Sue Prant, Director, Walk & Bike Month, Boulder, CO