Up With Riders: a Narrative Strategy

A highly successful Narrative Strategy I conceived and oversaw during my time at OPAL was the Up With Riders campaign launch. Given a large number of competing priorities in the realm of transportation, OPAL was losing ground and being overshadowed by upcoming advocacy groups like Sunrise Movement. We were being spoken over by mainstream organizations who claimed a “respectability” mantle. Regional governments were beginning to disregard OPAL’s leadership and membership, and we were stretched thin following many different issues. The only choice we had was to reset the conversation, and get ahead of an upcoming fare hike on transit. Up With Riders served to simplify our many competing priorities into a single, enticing demand: increase transit ridership by every means necessary, including making transit fareless.

In the lead up to the launch, I worked with members and a local reporter to prepare a front-page story for the local weekly paper The Portland Mercury. The day of the launch, June 19th, 2019, newsstands across the city featured the front page sub-headline: “The Case for a Fareless Trimet.” I provided exclusive access and a month of embargoed campaign content to the reporter, and I coached all the interview participants in the campaign talking points.

We also worked with a videographer to create the Up With Riders campaign launch video. The morning the article hit newsstands, the video went live on Facebook, where it quickly went viral. I scripted the video, coached the participants, and guided the videographer’s visual choices.

To launch the campaign, we sent an email (online version here) to our lists featuring the video.

That evening, we unveiled the campaign in the real world by testifying in front of a regional government agency. We made sure our membership testified first. Many testimonies from allied organizations who followed us were modified in real time to reflect their support for our demands.

Just a week later, members of Sunrise Movement were attending OPAL actions, using our #UpWithRiders and #DownWithFare hashtags, and signal-boosting our work across digital and print channels. We had retaken control of the story and assumed rightful leadership on issues of transportation justice by asserting a bold vision of the possible.

I then decided to use OPAL’s annual event – A Movement of Movements, happening a month after the campaign launch – as a fundraiser explicitly for the UWR campaign. The event was a massive success, and attracted more than 450 individuals, more than twice the previous year’s attendance, including multiple elected officials and dozens of transit and environmental organizational leaders. We more than doubled our prior year’s fundraising as well. At the event, we unveiled the Up With Riders logo and T-Shirts. I provided artistic direction for the design of both the logo and the shirts. 

The bus-shaped logo with people-lettering is meant to invoke the people who make up the community of bus riders being an integral part of the campaign. The primary focus of the t-shirt branding is sunny optimism (bright yellow), trust and stability (dark / navy blue), and OPAL’s ascendance (our three-ring logo rising from the UWR bus). The tagline “free the system” is provocative, and speaks to freedom from fares, traffic, and unsafe situations.

Talking points I wrote center increasing transit ridership as a solution to multiple problems our region faces. Copy from the landing page :

UWR is our campaign to stop fare hikes and win expansion of fareless, decriminalized public transportation.

This campaign incorporates what we’ve learned from nearly a decade of studying these issues and talking to transit users about their desires.

We no longer accept that transportation must be a private, for-profit system that excludes and criminalizes our communities, chokes our airways and streets, and destabilizes our climate.

We demand a truly public transportation system that is fareless, decriminalized, and deprioritizes private cars.

Mass transit must become a public service which excludes no person due to lack of payment, is controlled democratically by the people who rely most upon it, and serves everyone to the maximum extent possible.

Private companies which have long exploited public roadways and airways for profit must pay for the damage they have done to our cities. Major corporations have used our streets to gather resources at our expense. They must contribute to transforming our system.

Down with fares. Down with transit cops and climate pollution. Down with air toxics. Down with congestion. Down with undemocratic control over the decisions impacting our lives.

Up with riders!

Continuing the Battle of the Story, I helped to script, and performed the narration, for a street theater action that advanced some of the campaign goals prior to a related public meeting. I coached the member with pink hair’s to deliver his short speech at the end of the video.

Through well-timed testimony we forced decision-makers at Trimet to admit they intend to raise fares, which they had not stated publicly prior. The agency rushed forward with a new advertising campaign to promote hiring additional fare enforcement. Thanks to the work we’d accomplished in the months prior, and a positive relationship with a reporter, I was able to have the last word in an article on this issue in the state’s largest newspaper, The Oregonian:

Shawn Fleek, communications director for the nonprofit transit advocacy group OPAL, said the agency is trying to spin the [fare enforcement] hires with “the laughable claim” that transit riders care this much about whether other riders are paying to ride the rails. “Transit riders want to stop the fare hikes and win truly public transit free of traffic and racial profiling,” he said, with a nod to potential fare hikes in upcoming budgets.

“All that wasted time, money, and bureaucracy, because a rider didn’t have fare,” he said.

Fleek has another call to action. “If you see people evading fare, don’t write to TriMet and don’t complain to the driver. Just mind your own business and imagine a fareless transit system, where nobody is treated as if they were a criminal for moving freely in the world.”

Most recently, our membership has taken on prevention of a fare hike and stopping fare enforcement crackdowns by involving community in a meme-making competition on Twitter. The campaign received 1,700 engagements from 14,000 impressions in just three days.

The #UpWithRiders Narrative Strategy has been an unqualified success. Our messaging and demands have penetrated all local decision-making spaces. Mayoral candidates are using our talking points and wearing our T-shirts. City Commissioners are advancing our policy priorities. Our hashtags have been posted and shared tens of thousands of times across social media channels, been mentioned in dozens of public testimonies both with and without our direct coordination. The resulting boost in awareness has led to a 300% growth in OPAL’s membership in themonths that followed. The growth and newly-generated goodwill built capacity to engage on issues of transportation justice in the long haul. Our strategically-timed campaign came into public consciousness ahead of Trimet’s proposed fare hikes and increased enforcement, and put the agency in an untenable defensive position. The strategy had well-positioned us to stop fare hikes and win our demands.