We decided that we should know more about mobility issues, so we ran a very interesting survey in our neighbourhood. Then we organised a campaign which we shared through social networks like twitter and facebook. We had a nice time doing it!
The ideas
While we were thinking about safety on the roads, we decided we should find out about the biggest problem that causes the majority of road accidents, so we surveyed everybody in our community. We studied the results and discovered something really interesting. Almost 75% of the people answered that they sometimes ignore basic safety regulations, like wearing helmets when they ride a motorbike/bicycle, or use their cell phones while they are driving. They were also asked under what circumstances they considered that abiding by safety regulations is less important: 65% of them answered that abiding by these regulations is not so important when the commute is shorter than 2km because it is not a long commute and they do not use motorways. The last question was whether they had had an accident in the past while were driving and about 57% answered ‘Yes’. The most amazing thing was that most of them had just stated that abiding by safety regulations depended on different circumstances.
The bottom line is that we can predict that people who usually think safety regulations are not so important out themselves at risk, increasing their probability of suffering more accidents than those who think regulations are important.
We therefore decided to run a ‘Safety Advice Campaign’, but it should not be boring. It must be very visual: simple, clear and shocking. We used media sources to put it together. This campaign is aimed at young people mainly because as one of us said a few days ago: "Who is going to understand young people better than other youngsters who think just the same way?"
The initiatives
While we were deciding how we were going to run the project, we agreed that we wanted to make a simple but clear video. This was our final decision, but in the end we didn’t have the resources or enough time to make the video so we made a slideshow with five images: but even this way it is really cool.
The plot compares real life with a videogame because in a videogame you can take control, do what you want and there are no consequences, not like in real life. It is a good way to catch the attention of young people too. We are really impressed with the good feedback on our Security Campaign! In our twitter account (@safety_mobility), we have about 100 followers and so many Likes in Facebook! Everybody in the group uploaded the images to their account and shared them with their friends. People who have seen it tell us that they really like it. Even our teachers tell us the campaign is really original! It’s incredible how we feel right now, we can't describe it with words!
