SIU PRSSA Southern Illinois University Public Relations Student Society of America
Related Articles
This year Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the city partner together with VEO scooters. “SIU and the City of Carbondale are proud to announce a partnership with VEO Scooters! Before riding, view SIU’s and Carbondale’s scooter policies and use the bike map to plan riding routes.” Many residents are happy with the program as it offers another mode of transportation around the city while many more are irritated with the program as people sometimes leave the bikes in horrible spots as shown by Rachel Myers on a Facebook post she made only containing a photo of a scooter in the middle of the street. The students also love scooters as it gives them a mode of transportation to get the classes or to go out into town without having to take their cars or have to walk 20 to 30 minutes from campus.
For the PR of bringing in the scooters to Carbondale there was only the school and two local news companies. One of them KFVS12 that talked about the scooters coming into the city and what some residents thought about them. It seems that the launch was kind of quiet to the residents who live in Carbondale and for the most part just started noticing the scooters pop up. The company VEO handles their PR through their homepage and does not have much on their website. They have an entire page dedicated to the company in the news and successes they’ve had. They give an email address for media inquiries on that same page. They also have press kits available for people and businesses to use but upon checking these kits all they contain are .JPG files on the different scooters the company uses.
As for safety they have a whole page on their website for how their vehicles are built and how to use feedback from city officials and riders to make them safer. They also go on to list the various safety features that are downloaded onto the vehicles based on local use. An example of this is all the vehicles have geofencing on them. Geofencing it is basically a boundary that is set into the bikes so people cannot ride outside of it and endanger themselves. All in all, VEO is a great addition to Carbondale and the school and providing many benefits for the residents and the students and continue to provide a safer experience as time goes on for their customers.
