Better on the bike – keeping motorcyclists safe for National Police Chiefs Council
Although they represent just 1% of total road traffic, around 20% of deaths and serious injuries are motorcyclists. An average of six lose their lives each week and over a hundred are seriously injured.
The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) contacted us to collaborate on a project to reduce harms to motorcyclists as part of its national Project Apex effort. The focus was to be on Bank Holiday Weekends in the spring, when dust covers come off thousands of bikes and riders head back on to the road, often after a lengthy break.
After agreeing with NPCC a strategic focus on leisure riders (as opposed to commuters, or gig economy riders), we researched and designed a new campaign and messaging to encourage our mid-life audience to adopt safer riding behaviours.
To do this we initially undertook a discovery phase, interviewing 16 sector experts and academics, reviewing fifty previous safety campaigns, reports and evaluations and designing a hypothesis for behavioural change for our audience.
Next we co-designed the approach. We worked up provisional designs and messaging exploring four different behavioural motivators and ran focus groups with riders to evaluate and refine the ideas into a final route. This route emerged as Ride Craft – and emphasised skills improvement on the bike, rather than explicitly safety. Our groups responded incredibly strongly, with an almost universal desire to be the best rider they could be.
We developed the campaign to deliver tips on the best riding approaches from the best riders in the country, as we observed the respect motorcyclists have for highly skilled fellow riders. In engaging around these expert riding behaviours, our audience would by default learn the safest way to execute these riding styles.
After testing we built out a campaign toolkit with a fresh look & feel, messaging guidance, social-media ready copy and adverts and a full FAQ about the approach. A range of forces undertook activity guided by the toolkit in the northern forces region and the southern.
Evaluation revealed encouraging results. The website drove 5000 visits in its short pilot period, with three quarters of users surveyed through the site saying they had learned something new and 80% finding it helpful. Around 75% of website visitors expressed intention to adopt some or all of the riding techniques we shared.
Officers using the Ride Craft toolkit and resources also fed back positively, with 90% of them feeling the approach had potential to reduce deaths or serious injury to riders, and they collectively scored the campaign at 4.1/5 in terms of it landing positively with the public in their interactions on the ground. The evaluation informs a wider analysis of the Project Apex pilot activities with great potential for the campaign to be extended nationwide.
When I was approached to be a stakeholder in this piece of work I was genuinely excited, not only as a motorcyclist myself, but also being very aware of the disproportionality in the number of riders killed and seriously injured, and knowing the challenges we have engaging with them.
I can honestly say I was slightly sceptical of the initial plan but as the product developed and took shape I was really impressed by the understanding Claremont had gained and the rationale behind their approach. The final product has been well received by colleagues and the public and I hope we can build on this and develop it more in the future so people can safely enjoy the freedom of two wheels.
Chief Superintendent Marc Clothier, National Roads Policing Operations Intelligence and Investigations