2021 Year in Review – Riding the Wave of Change

Since 2002, Alberta One-Call Corp.’s mandate included promoting education and awareness on initiating the damage-prevention process. While the call to action has shifted from Call Before You Dig to ClickBeforeYouDig, and now includes Where’s the Line?, promoting overhead powerline safety and awareness, the goal has always been the same – promote safety, and the safety process, to Albertans. 

Was the rebrand to Utility Safety Partners following unification with the Alberta Common Ground Alliance and the Joint Utility Safety Team’s Where’s the Line campaign risky? Not really, but I had concerns. Changing the banner on a longstanding safety service like Alberta One-Call takes a lot of planning — but looking back, the biggest shift had already taken place almost a decade earlier when we began promoting ClickBeforeYouDig. When that happened, there was an immediate and unmistakable shift to web locate requests, but it still took a few years for the web service to really lock-in with users, and it was during that time we realized Alberta One-Call as a name really wasn’t that important after all. Rather, it was the call to action that carried the weight. So, ClickBeforeYouDig was moved to the forefront while Alberta One-Call was purposely moved to the background.

Dial Before You Dig (DBYD) is the notification centre servicing Australia and in contrast to its name, over 97 per cent of all locate requests are submitted online — only three per cent “dial”. I recall asking one of their senior leaders why they hadn’t changed their name to reflect that and the answer was simple. “Why? It doesn’t matter what our name is. Clearly, what’s important is our call to action and our service.”

A call to action is a prompt or command instructing a person to do something specific — to take an action — and generally takes the form of a button or hyperlink. Moreover, as mentioned in another article in this month’s Click to Know What’s Above and Below, Albertans used our services over 450,000 times last year. So, am I worried we are at risk of losing our market? No, I’m not. Rather, I’m focused on the opportunity to expand it, leveraging awareness of our core service to promote overhead powerline safety and the excellent work of our committees.

We use a lot of tools to promote awareness of our calls to action and our brand — some you might not even know about — and moving forward, we’ll be leveraging these tools to promote broader awareness of Utility Safety Partners’ expanded mandate.

Radio Advertising

USP revised its radio campaign in 2021 to include overhead powerline/Where’s the Line awareness and ran ads across 40 stations throughout Alberta between April and November. The combined overhead and buried energy and utility asset radio campaign eliminated duplication, leveraged USP brand awareness and promoted energy and utility safety.

Social Media

USP’s corporate social media profile, and three safety ambassador profiles, further promote USP’s education and awareness campaign. USP’s corporate Twitter profile boasts more followers than any damage prevention organization in North America including the Common Ground Alliance serving members across the United States. Following rebrand rollout, USP redirected the Where’s the Line and ABCGA social media profiles to USP’s. Once again, duplication was eliminated while leveraging USP brand awareness.

Unique to USP, each safety ambassador maintains and manages their own social media profile and we are proud of the level of engagement our ambassadors have reached with the unique quality of their posts. Their combined 1,600 Twitter engagements in 2021 attracted 189 new followers.

USP and ATCO teamed up for a social media campaign targeting homeowners and contractors. The homeowner campaign launched April 20, 2021 and the contractor campaign launched May 10. The campaigns employed geo-fencing to reach target audiences and generated millions of impressions (over 1.2 million homeowner impressions between April 20 and May 31). The campaigns ran until the end of August.

Prairie Podcast

Podcasts have become an additional awareness and education tool that provides a deeper dive for the promoter and are akin to a coffee meeting with a captive audience. Always seeking new ways to promote ClickBeforeYouDig and Where’s the Line, and extend the boundaries of awareness, USP embarked on a trial podcast run in 2021; committing to 16 podcasts exploring various elements of USP operations, history, influence and strategic direction. Over the year, Prairie Podcast episodes were downloaded over 750 times — more coffee meetings than one person could have in a year!

eNewsletter – Click to Know What’s Above and Below

After revising the structure to promote and support USP’s eNewsletter, it was reactivated last year in a joint contract with Naylor Association Solutions. The newsletter reaches over 70,000 recipients every month with articles repurposed on various USP social media platforms.

Safety Ambassadors

Following unification with the Alberta Common Ground Alliance and the JUST’s Safety Team’s Where’s the Line campaign, USP’s DigSafe ambassadors began promoting overhead powerline safety awareness as well as DigSafe/ClickBeforeYouDig awareness and are now referred to as safety ambassadors. 

Utility Safety Partners supports three ambassadors in Calgary, Edmonton and the Industrial Heartland. In 2022, a fourth ambassador providing services between Rocky Mountain House and Stettler will be in place.

The ambassadors’ combined efforts culminated in over 800 direct and 21,000 indirect interactions with buried facility owners, community outreach, equipment/materials suppliers, general contractors, homebuilders, line-locating contractors, municipalities, realtors/real estate companies and safety representatives. 

Promotional Materials

Ambassadors promoted awareness using a variety of USP promotional materials (brochures, mousepads, cell phone wallets, colour code decals, cooling towels, keychains, pens, water bottles, etc.) and were outfitted with rebranded (AOC to USP) materials prior to the rebrand cutover. Even their trucks underwent a makeover!

Mike Sullivan – USP President