Running your Road Safety Week: Guidance for companies

Employers – especially those with staff who drive for work – can make a huge difference to road safety, and improve their reputation, staff morale and reduce costs at the same time.

Organising or taking part in a Road Safety Week is an ideal opportunity for companies to promote life-saving messages and show their commitment to road safety to employees and their families, customers, suppliers and local communities. Whether you are organising your own Road Safety Week or participating in an existing Week, there are lots of ways your company can get involved and benefit.

If you have staff who drive for work, Road Safety Week can help you fulfil your responsibility for the safety of your staff and people around them, reduce costly crashes involving company drivers and vehicles, and contribute to safer roads. It can be a springboard to launch year-round road safety programmes and a good way to develop and reinforce a safe driving culture among employees.

By engaging the general public in Road Safety Week you can help get important road safety messages across more widely, reinforce internal awareness-raising, and get positive exposure and enhance your reputation.

STEP ONE: Check if there’s a Road Safety Week where you are, and if not set a date!

Check out our map of Road Safety Weeks to see if there is a Road Safety Week you can take part in in your country or region, or contact your local or national authority. You can also use the map to browse case studies for ideas and information from existing Road Safety Weeks around the world.

If there is already a Road Safety Week in your country or region, put the date in your diary and plan how you can take part. Use the ideas below, plus any guidance provided by your national/regional organisers.

If you don’t have an existing Road Safety Week where you are, don’t worry – you can organise your own using the advice below, on a week of your choice. We suggest planning your event at least two months in advance, ideally more, at a time of year that is less busy for your organisation. You could contact local or national government officials and/or emergency services to see if they can help. You could even work with them to organise a regional or national Road Safety Week and promote it to other companies, schools and community groups.

STEP TWO: Choose a theme

Whether you’re taking part in an existing Road Safety Week or organising your own, it’s a good idea to consider in advance what road safety issue(s) you will focus on, what you’re aiming to achieve and what messages you want to promote and to whom. If you’re taking part in an existing Road Safety Week, find out if there is a theme that might be relevant for you to address.

You could focus on a road safety issue that affects your company or something that affects the wider community your company operates in. You could consult staff, customers, business contacts or local people to find out their views and concerns about road safety in advance. If you have staff who drive for work, collecting and analysing data on the crashes and incidents they are involved in will help you identify the main risk factors and key messages to promote to staff about safe driving.

You could consider using the Brake Pledge, or choosing one of the Pledge topics, as your theme. It includes six key promises people can make to protect themselves and others, each of which is ideal for using through an awareness-raising campaign. Each promise includes something drivers can do and something everyone can do, and is written in a clear and concise way. Brake offers free webinars on using the Pledge to run workshops for drivers and Pledge resources. You can also find guidance on developing and communicating road safety messages in our publicity guide, or explore the resources on this site for more ideas.

You could also subscribe to Brake's service for employers, to receive advice, information and resources year-round to help you promote safe driving and manage road risk, which you can draw on to inform your activities. 

STEP THREE: Plan activities

Whether you’re taking part in an existing Road Safety Week or organising your own, here are some ways you can do it, with links to resources and extra information.

Engage staff and customers

There are some simple, effective ways to get life-saving messages to your staff, customers and contacts. You could:

• Include a road safety feature in your newsletter, magazine, intranet or website. You could include staff/customer views on how safe local roads are and facts and figures from your area. You could also use it to promote the Brake Pledge and ask all staff to make the Pledge.
• Print and put up posters on your premises. Go to the resource pages to download Road Safety Week posters, and/or run a competition for your employees' children to design their own, linked to your theme.
• Run road safety presentations or workshops with employees who drive. You can explore topics such as vehicle maintenance, speed, distractions and driver tiredness. Make use of tools such as Brake’s stopping distance activity or morning after drink-driving calculator, or road safety videos, organised by topic in the tools & resources section. Attend a free Brake webinar on how to deliver Pledge workshops to drivers.
• Encourage staff to leave their cars at home and use an alternative mode of transport for a day, or the week. Provide advice and support on using public transport, walking and cycling, like publicising local bus routes, running free bicycle maintenance checks, or providing pedometres. You may even be able to work with a local transport company to offer discounted public transport use for the week.
• Use Road Safety Week to launch or publicise a year-round road safety programme, such as introducing new policies and procedures to manage your road risk and ensure safe driving. Get advice from Brake on road risk management by subscribing to our scheme for employers.
• Run a road safety quiz for staff or customers with prizes.

Engage the community

Most communities care greatly about road safety, and value the support of local organisations to raise awareness and make roads safer. You could:

• Organise a road safety presentation for a local school, college or community group. This could go through the Brake Pledge, make use of road safety videos, adverts and interactive tools, include live demonstrations (see our educators' page for ideas), or use a company vehicle (such as a truck or bus safely-parked on the school grounds) to show the blind spots around large vehicles and measure out stopping distances.
• Encourage and support local schools to run their own road safety lessons, assemblies and activities at the same time as
  your Road Safety Week. See our teaching ideas.
• Run a road safety poster or film competition for local children or young people, where you offer prizes, and display the winning entry locally, such as in a shopping centre.
• Offer staff volunteering time to help road safety activities organised by the local authority or emergency services.
• Support or initiate a campaign for improved road safety measures in the community, such as lower speed limits, improved speed enforcement, or safe walking and cycling paths. Consult staff, customers and members of the community to find out if there are campaigns you can get involved in or to identify local concerns. See Brake’s community campaign advice.

STEP FOUR: Organise resources

Whatever you’re planning, make use of resources to support and promote your activities and get important road safety messages out. Free downloadable posters and other tools are available on our tools & resources pages, plus you'll find advice on developing your own materials on our publicity guide.

The Brake UK shop can also deliver Road Safety Week branded resources internationally including t-shirts, balloons and posters, to help you let everyone know it’s your Road Safety Week.

If you are organising a Road Safety Week as part of an existing national or regional Week, check if the national or regional organisers have resources available.

STEP FIVE: Engage partners

Partnerships are a great way to pool resources and promote road safety to more people. Partners may be able to deliver road safety workshops and presentations, provide support and input with organising larger events and activities, and help you to engage a wider audience outside your organisation. You might also be able to encourage and help partners deliver their own road safety activities during your Road Safety Week.

Partners may include your local authority’s road safety team, police, emergency services, community groups or local schools. It’s a good idea to get in touch with them early on, while planning your activities, to find out if and how they can be involved, or how you can help them with their wider road safety work, and give them plenty of notice. Use the other guidance pages on this site, for governments and NGOs, schools and local groups, to help and advise others to get the most from the Week.

Bear in mind that partners may be able to work with you to spread your Road Safety Week more widely. For example, if you're organising an internal Road Safety Week to run across your organisation, you could consider engaging a national or regional authority, and encouraging and helping them to extend the Week across your country or region, by promoting involvement to other organisations, schools and community groups. You'll find advice on coordinating a national or regional Road Safety Week on our governments & NGOs page.

STEP SIX: Publicise your Week

Whatever activities you are planning, help build excitement and enthusiasm for your Road Safety Week by publicising it in advance, during and after the event. This could include letting everyone taking part know when Road Safety Week is happening, what you’re planning and why road safety is important through:

• Putting posters up with the date of your Week. You can use Brake's Road Safety Week poster with space for your date.
• Including articles in your company bulletin/newsletter/intranet/website. You can download Road Safety Week web banners on our promotional resources page, or our Road Safety Week logo for use in communications.
• Promoting the Week on your company’s social media channels. 
• If you engage customers through an email bulletin or magazine, include a section about the Week.
• Contacting potential partners as above and asking if they can help with publicity too, and encourage involvement in the Week from others.
• Sending a press release to and/or contacting local media to let them know what’s happening. See Brake's guidance on publicity and the media.

As well as doing all the above in advance of your week, planning more publicity like this during the Week itself can be a great way to reach a wide audience with key road safety messages. Read our publicity and media guide for detailed advice on how to do this effectively.

Plus don't forget afterwards to let everyone know how it went. Taking pictures of and filming your activities (with permission from participants) will help you show how your Road Safety Week has been a success, get the road safety message out, and promote next year’s event.

STEP SEVEN: Evaluate and communicate outcomes

Evaluating your Week will give you an indication of the reach and success of your event, and what worked well and not so well, to help you plan for future years and continue to engage partners. It's therefore a good idea to record your output as you go along, and build in evaluation methods, ensuring you can measure success against your aims.

As well as recording what activities you have run, and those run by partners, and the reach and levels of involvement in these, you could also assess the amount of publicity achieved, and gather feedback from staff, customers, other participants and partners. You could do this by emailing out a simple feedback survey to each of these groups, for example asking them to tell you if they took part in any activities or came across any communications about the Week, and to rate information and activities, and make suggestions for future Weeks. You may be able to use a free online tool to do this like surveymonkey.

Once you've carried out an evaluation of your event, communicate your successes - including metrics and examples of the activities that took place and comments from participants. You could present this in an evaluation report (see Brake's RSW UK evaluations for example), on a dedicated web page, and/or as an infographic, and then share this with participants, partners, and organisations you're hoping might get involved next year.

We would appreciate it if you can also tell Brake how it went by filling in our short form. We are keen to find out about Road Safety Weeks around the world and share the experiences and ideas of organisers and participants. We may contact you to ask if we can include your example as a case study on this site.

STEP EIGHT: Plan for next year

Road Safety Week is great for focusing everyone’s attention on road safety, but it should be a priority year-round, so use the experience of running your Road Safety Week to consider how you can continue promoting road safety with employees, customers and in the community. It’s a good idea to set the date for your next Road Safety Week as soon as the last one is over, so you can start planning for next year well in advance.

   -   Browse case studies of existing road safety events for ideas
   -   Get tools and resources for your Road Safety Week
   -   Contact us and tell us about your event
   -   Download this guidance document as a PDF
   -   Find out how Brake can help companies promote road safety year-round