Excite­ment abounded last Tues­day evening as the win­ners of the 2014 FLEXY Awards ascended the stage and claimed their awards.

The FLEXYs are open to all fleet pro­fes­sion­als, regard­less of whether or not they were mem­bers of NAFA Fleet Man­age­ment Asso­ci­a­tion. Indus­try lead­ers, act­ing as judges in the selec­tion process for final­ists and win­ners, never saw the names of nom­i­nees or the orga­ni­za­tions they work for. Vot­ing was 100 per­cent blind; based solely upon the actions and ideas listed by the nom­i­nees on their sub­mis­sion forms. This allowed for unbi­ased selec­tion based strictly on the qual­ity of nom­i­nee accomplishments.

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As a mar­ket­ing and brand­ing pro­fes­sional in the fleet indus­try for many years, I’ve had the oppor­tu­nity to explain how to build a down­stream mar­ket­ing strat­egy that wins the sup­port of dri­vers and field fleet admin­is­tra­tors. Fleet man­agers know that these are poten­tial “advo­cates” whose behav­ior can help or hin­der achieve­ment of oper­a­tional goals.

The most-often asked follow-up ques­tion I get is “HOW does one effec­tively com­mu­ni­cate with dri­vers who have much more on their minds than adher­ing to fleet pol­icy as they go about their busi­ness day.” Once again, I like to apply marketing-based solu­tions to the prob­lem of “cut­ting through the clutter.”

Here are my 10 tips for deliv­er­ing a mes­sage and mak­ing it stick:

Tip #1: Exploit emotions.

Adver­tis­ers do it all the time: peo­ple share sim­i­lar emo­tional needs: to feel attrac­tive, to feel fit and healthy, to be liked, to feel secure, to save embar­rass­ment, to avoid feel­ing guilty. Facts cer­tainly mat­ter in adver­tis­ing, but they mat­ter because they can gen­er­ate and rein­force emotion.

In the case of dri­vers, you might be sell­ing the need to change dan­ger­ous behaviors—for exam­ple, when you want peo­ple to buckle their seat belts, pay atten­tion while dri­ving, or not drive impaired—some emo­tional but­tons become more promi­nent than oth­ers. In these cases, the needs to feel healthy and safe, and to avoid guilt or embar­rass­ment, to demon­strate loy­alty to an employer…these are obvi­ous emo­tional targets.

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Donlen offi­cially launched the next gen­er­a­tion of FleetWeb, its fully inte­grated fleet man­age­ment plat­form, dur­ing NAFA 2014. Build­ing on enhance­ments released in Q4 2013, FleetWeb has under­gone fur­ther major site wide changes to improve users’ pro­duc­tiv­ity and over­all experience.

“We’ve changed the nav­i­ga­tion to bring the most-used areas for­ward so users can access impor­tant infor­ma­tion more quickly and more eas­ily,” said Den­nis Straight, Donlen’s CIO and SVP IT, “But what’s hap­pen­ing behind the scenes is where the true pro­duc­tiv­ity gains are achieved. The HTML-5 plat­form com­bined with upgraded servers is mak­ing FleetWeb the most effi­cient and user-friendly fleet man­age­ment tool in the indus­try today.”

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For daily oper­a­tions, it is impor­tant that your GPS track­ing soft­ware is up and run­ning at all times. That’s why it is imper­a­tive when look­ing for a new solu­tion that you ask prospec­tive GPS track­ing providers about downtime.

So, what is GPS track­ing down­time? This term is used to describe peri­ods when soft­ware is tem­porar­ily unavail­able due to things like main­te­nance. This becomes a big issue when you begin to relay on this soft­ware for mul­ti­ple aspects of daily busi­ness, because what good are all of the fea­tures when sys­tems are down frequently?

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Clean­FUEL USA announced imme­di­ate avail­abil­ity of the propane auto­gas industry’s first com­plete fuel net­work man­age­ment sys­tem for elec­tronic dis­pensers, Clean­FUEL eCON­NECT.

Fleet man­agers can eco­nom­i­cally mon­i­tor and con­trol fuel inven­to­ries faster and eas­ier than ever before using Clean­FUEL ECONNECT with real-time data insight, flex­i­ble report stor­age and remote access capabilities.

“While the fleet indus­try has made amaz­ing strides in adop­tion of propane auto­gas, it has also lacked an eco­nom­i­cal and inno­v­a­tive solu­tion at the pump that uti­lizes all that soft­ware tech­nol­ogy has to offer,” said Cur­tis Don­ald­son, founder and man­ag­ing part­ner of Clean­FUEL USA.

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Frost & Sul­li­van rec­og­nizes Tel­o­gis with the 2013 North Amer­i­can Frost & Sul­li­van Award for Com­pany of the Year in light com­mer­cial vehi­cle telem­at­ics based on its recent analy­sis of the mar­ket. Over the past sev­eral years, Tel­o­gis has pur­sued an aggres­sive growth strat­egy focus­ing on invest­ments in inno­va­tion and expand­ing its global reach.

“Over­all, Tel­o­gis has gained a rep­u­ta­tion as a mission-critical tech­nol­ogy part­ner that offers a range of next-generation solu­tions to com­pa­nies that require work order man­age­ment, rout­ing, telem­at­ics, as well as mobile inte­gra­tion and nav­i­ga­tion ser­vices,” said Nan­dini Tare, indus­try ana­lyst at Frost & Sullivan.

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NAFA is devel­op­ing a pro­gram which will encour­age increased effi­ciency and reduced emis­sions and fuel use among vehi­cle fleets. Devel­oped in con­junc­tion with CALSTART, the NAFA Sus­tain­able Fleet Stan­dard Pro­gram is one of its kind.

“The impor­tance of sus­tain­able prac­tices becomes more evi­dent each day,” said NAFA Pres­i­dent Claude T. Mas­ters, CAFM. “By becom­ing more energy inde­pen­dent and effi­cient our mem­bers will extend ben­e­fits to their bot­tom line and their cus­tomer base.”

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The CEI Group, Inc. (CEI) offered pre­views of Dri­ver­Care ™ 5.0, the lat­est gen­er­a­tion of its sig­na­ture online fleet dri­ver safety and risk man­age­ment sys­tem, at the NAFA Fleet Man­age­ment Asso­ci­a­tion 2014 Insti­tute and Expo.

“The pri­mary goals of Dri­ver­Care™ 5.0 are to make it eas­ier, faster and more intu­itive for fleet and risk pro­fes­sional admin­is­tra­tors and field man­agers to find the infor­ma­tion they’re look­ing for, and to make it effort­less to switch between CEI’s online fleet safety and acci­dent man­age­ment sys­tems,” said Brian Kin­niry, CEI’s man­ager of risk and safety services.

Among the enhance­ments in Dri­ver­Care ™5.0 are:

Dri­ver Score­card - An entirely new page in Dri­ver­Care, the Dri­ver Score­card pro­vides a snap­shot, high-level sum­mary of all the kinds of infor­ma­tion in a driver’s record, and enables fleet admin­is­tra­tors to drill down into any cat­e­gory for more detailed information.

“For exam­ple, the score­card might say a dri­ver has two acci­dents, has taken five online lessons and has two open items to com­plete,” Mr. Kin­niry explained.”Instead of see­ing all that detail on one page, or using a nav­i­ga­tion tool­bar to find it, a fleet admin­is­tra­tor can click on any item directly on the score­card to get the details.”

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ARI® has announced that it has acquired Ger­man com­pany netcar24. The tech­nol­ogy com­pany devel­ops and offers inno­v­a­tive enter­prise soft­ware solu­tions for the fleet man­age­ment industry.

“We are so pleased to have netcar24 join the ARI fam­ily of com­pa­nies,” said ARI Pres­i­dent Carl A. Ortell. “netcar24 has a long his­tory of devel­op­ing ground­break­ing prod­ucts that help fleets oper­ate more effi­ciently and trans­par­ently, which is directly in-line with ARI’s approach to fleet man­age­ment. I believe their drive to offer state-of-the-art tech­nol­ogy that pro­vides real value will be a tremen­dous addi­tion to ARI.”

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