Oregon Active Transportation Summit

Active transportation affects people’s daily lives, safety, and families — yet we often communicate about this work in ways that feel overly technical or abstract. Campaigns meant to educate or change behavior need a deeper strategy to stick with people after they walk away. So how do we share complex information in ways that spark curiosity, empathy, and action? In this interactive session, the Toole Design team will share practical strategies for creating clear, compelling calls to action that resonate with stakeholders and community members. We’ll show how understanding your audiences, thoughtful messaging, strong visual design, and human-centered storytelling come together to build grass-roots support for transportation projects, programs, and funding efforts. The workshop will start with a brief presentation on the general strategy that the Toole Design team uses to create transportation campaigns, showing how important collaboration between planners, designers, and the client is, giving attendees direction on how to start thinking about messaging and campaign development. From there, we’ll gather campaign needs or issues from the audience and allow the Toole Design team to create a campaign or work through challenges in real time, offering the audience opportunities to ask questions, give feedback or suggestions, and/or tag in to become part of the campaign development team. Participants will learn about collaboration across disciplines and leave the workshop with the basic tools to tackle real-world communication challenges, developing creative approaches that blend planning, strategy, and design.Attendees will leave with:Ideas for communicating complex, safety-focused projectsAn understanding of how to determine the story and key audiences of a communication campaignIdeas for making outreach materials more engaging and approachableExperience applying creative thinking to real communication challengesNew connections with peers facing similar opportunities!This session is designed to be collaborative, hands-on, and energizing — where planning meets design, and technical expertise meets human connection. Come play with us!