Incentives for Establishment Participation

Support from the management and staff of local restaurants, bars and nightclubs will enhance the success of your efforts. Ideally, they should support your program by allowing publicity about your service in their building, training their servers to encourage patrons to use your program, offering non-alcoholic drinks to patrons who identify themselves as a designated driver and by financially contributing to the service you are providing them.

Some of the reasons owners should support your efforts are:

• Supporting a safe ride or designated driver program demonstrates that a vendor follows responsible business practices.
  
  
• By participating in both a safe ride and a designated driver program, a business demonstrates their responsibility even further. This shows that the establishment monitors consumption and are able to assist impaired solo drives and inebriated patrons who elect not to participate in the designated driver program.
  
  
• Insurance companies may be persuaded to offer discounts on liability insurance to establishments that participate in safe ride programs.
  
  
• The cost of participating in one or both of these programs is minimal compared to the benefit they would receive.
  
  
• Participating in a safe ride program will not decrease profits made by the establishment. As a result of the good publicity from participating in such a program, establishments are likely to notice an increase in the number of people who visit their establishment rather than those businesses that don't support the services.
  
  
• Cover charges need not be affected by participating in safe ride or designated driver programs. Patrons who participate in either program can still be required to pay the normal charge.
  
  
• Both safe ridge programs and designated driver programs require little change of current business practices. The only requirements for an establishment to participate in a safe ride program would be to permit flyers advertising the service to be displayed and to encourage patrons to use the service as needed. To participate in a designated driver program, a business would simply provide free soft drinks to designated drivers (which is very inexpensive), monitor who is a designated driver (which places that admit patrons under the drinking age already do) and ask servers to encourage customer participation. Neither service would necessitate extra staffing, liability or unreasonable burdens on behalf of the business.
  
  
• Supporting safe ride and designated driver programs is good for community relations.

Customers are more likely to frequent establishments they feel care about their well being.

• Publicity from participating in safe ride and designated driver programs can be very favorable to businesses. Press releases, public service announcements, educational materials, publicity items, and recognitions ceremonies undertaken by the sponsoring organization(s) often bring attention to sponsoring establishments.

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