Travel Plan marketing activity should not just be about the launch of the Travel Plan, it should be about regular messages throughout the year.

In order for your Travel Plan to be successful, you need to ensure that your approach is persistent and long term. It is important to refresh the messages regularly in order for them to remain effective and not just become background noise.

Here are a few things to consider when thinking about refreshing your travel planning messages:

• Make use of key events/seasonal activities - use the attached Calendar of Sustainable Travel Related Events and see how you could piggy back onto events/themes already taking place.

• Select a key theme (cost savings, health and wellbeing, environmental benefits) that you wish to focus on and build around this theme. For example, if you concentrated on the cost saving benefits when you launched your Travel Plan, consider focusing on health and wellbeing in Year 2. You can also link into active travel events or seasonal triggers such as New Year resolutions, start of the better weather or national health days/themes.

• Constant communication is important. Make sure you are using all available channels to communicate with your employees. Make use of the intranet, emails and notice boards as well as any Working Groups or Mode Groups that you have set up. Have a communications schedule in place with key messages that you wish to get across.

• Keep information up to date. Make sure that the information that is given to employees is up to date and accurate. Employees need to have confidence in the information that is provided. Out of date information will have a negative impact.

• Ensure that you build interest for your travel planning measures by running teaser style communications to build up the interest. Let employees know that there is something to look out for.

• Consider ad hoc incentives to support schemes such as a Bike to Work.  As your Travel Plan becomes more established you need to make sure that you maintain the profile of such schemes and look to encourage new members. This could be offering a FREE bike maintenance service to existing Bike to Work members and to any new recruits who join the scheme during a particular time period. To encourage interest in your car sharing scheme, you could consider offering a reward to the first 10 employees to register on the car sharing database in a given week.

• Reward sustainable travel. This type of reward approach will not only encourage others to sign up, but it will also help to maintain the enthusiasm of those already travelling sustainably. You could offer free coffee/tea vouchers for those who cycle/walk to work over a given period.

• Consider partnership opportunities as a good way to refresh your Travel Plan. Approach local bus/train operators about offering discounted rates on travel passes for a limited period. You may also wish to team up with other local employees to promote car sharing for example. There may be an opportunity to extend your organisation’s car sharing scheme to incorporate employees from a neighbouring organisation.

• Look for opportunities to link into other initiatives throughout the organisation. This could include programmes such as the Healthy Working Lives programme.