The Washington State Department of Transportation has UW students to thank for putting together some ideas that could possibly be implemented for WSDOT in the future. Friday, June 8, three teams of students came together in the Communication building to present their projects for a strategic communications competition to WSDOT representatives. Funded by the Francis B. Francois Award, three finalist teams, consisting of Anna Huang and Starling Shan; Dacia Saenz; Sean Fraser, Kondrad Palubicki, and Laurie Sperry, presented their proposals on how to improve different aspects of communication within WSDOT. A fourth team, Billy Witherspoon and Lydia Rin Kye, did not present.

The Francis B. Francois Award was created by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials in 2000, honoring a former AASHTO executive director. The AASHTO Standing Committee on Performance Management chooses the winner of the award, a state transportation department, which has implemented an outstanding innovative program.

By accepting the award, WSDOT received a fellowship to bestow on state university students. They decided to partner with the University of Washington to create the strategic communications competition, with $5000 going toward the chosen competing teams to fund the completion of their projects. “The partnership with WSODT is a great example of the value that places like UW and WSU can add…the development of timely and relevant solutions to the challenges that we face in the state of Washington,” said Scott Macklin, Associate Director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media.

Presenting first were Shan and Huang, with their recommendations on how the WSDOT can better communicate with students surrounding the SR520 bridge construction, and how they can make travel across the bridge more convenient for the UW student body. The team recommended that a status widget for the UW website be created in order to notify students of most recent updates on the construction that would link directly back to the WSDOT website. Shan and Huang also recommended more frequent use of social media by WSDOT with updates similar to what would be on the UW widget, as well as a more easily student-accessible payment system for the GoodToGo tolling system.

Saenz was next to present, and brought forward her idea of “Short C.U.T.S. (Short Creative Uses of Traffic in Seattle)”. Saenz recommended that WSDOT spark conversation within the community about ways to get around congested areas through social media and message boards. People can share their own “secret” routes, and learn what insight others may have, as well. She also suggested that WSDOT partner with different companies, like Microsoft, PBS, or Audible.com, to provide commuters a way to get to their “happy place” when they are stuck in traffic. Possible activities drivers could engage in could include learning a new language, listening to an audio book, or practicing their karaoke skills.

Lastly, Fraser, Palubicki and Sperry shared their social media guidebook which can help WSDOT employees choose the best social media tools for the different kinds of information they want to communicate to the public.  The team determined that most people use Facebook to get information from WADOT. The public would like to see more posts about traffic accidents and other things that may affect their driving and interact more with WADOT when the agency uses photographs and cross-promotion amongst many social media platforms in their social media posts. On WSDOT’s YouTube page, the most popular videos are disaster simulations and the team determined that people generally want to see things that they wouldn’t normally see. WADOT should continue to give the public visualizations like that, but be conscious of YouTube best practices surrounding length and editing of videos to tell a better story.

Jeremy Bertrand of WSDOT Communications said he was very happy with what he saw in the presentations. “It was a pleasure working with the students and hearing such unique and creative ideas presented to real world problems.” To learn more about the students’ proposals, watch their presentations on the Flip The Media YouTube page >>