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Prepared for the Centro team
Centro moves five counties every day. TheHub only opens from a desk inside the building, so the 550 people doing the moving are the last to hear anything. This is what fixing that looks like.
Not a mock-up. Your Centro workspace is live, and you can join it with the link below.Lynette asked what we’d show if this were our one and only shot. Here it is.
TheHub needs a work desktop inside a Centro building. Operators and mechanics never get near one, and even office staff lose it the moment they leave. The newest Department News post is from September 2025.
One app that reaches all 550 people without a company email or a Microsoft license. Vista timesheets, policies and your RPM program on a phone, plus a timestamped record of who’s read a safety notice.
CDTA, 800 people across four counties in your own state, reached 87% without making it mandatory. They’d built a replacement SharePoint intranet and shelved it before launch.
Open the Centro workspace we’ve already built, send us one answer from IT on Microsoft tiers, and pick this up the week after Labor Day.
What Blink is
Blink is one app for your whole workforce. Company news, safety notices and your Quick Links, on the phone already in an operator's pocket.
What we heard from you
The case for change at Centro, short enough that whoever you forward it to gets it first time.
It only opens from a work desktop on site. Operators and mechanics are locked out by design, and office staff lose it the moment they leave.
Bulletin boards and email tell you nothing about who saw what. A Mandatory Read gives you a timestamped record, name by name.
Teams, email, TheHub, the file servers, and separate programs with their own logins. All of it behind one door.
Your newest Department News post is from September 2025. The writing was never the problem, the place it sat was.
RPM winners, Swap Stop, careers and the holiday schedule are all running today. Almost none of it reaches the floor.
Five vendors reviewed, two going forward. This page is built for that shortlist, and for the executive team who sees it next.
“Usually just the administrative part of the organization pays attention to those.”
Lynette Paduano“And sometimes not even them.”
Alicia Hughes On who reads the intranet today, 14 August 2026Executive leadership made an internal app a priority this summer and asked the two of you to find something TheHub could never be.
You’ve had Blink on your radar for about eighteen months, since Centro leadership watched CDTA present on it at APTA.
Two audiences, two paths
Your executive team decides. IT and cyber security have to be comfortable. A path for each.
What changes when everyone can be reached, proof from a sister authority in your own state, and what it costs.
Open the executive case → Path twoWhy Blink never touches your network, how identity works with Entra and Vista, and the answers CDTA's IT Director needed.
Open the IT view →Path one, for your executive team
Built for your shape of workforce: shift-based, mostly deskless, spread across five counties and six locations.
Rated number one for employee communications on Gartner Peer Insights. Figures are blended across Blink's customer base.
These are the people the executive case is about, out across five counties every day. Blink reaches them where they already are.
Proven on the frontline
CDTA runs the Albany region across four counties with 800 people. Buses, paratransit, maintenance, a unionized frontline, and hardly any company email addresses.
“We don't have to tell people to use Blink anymore. They want to, because it makes their jobs easier.”
Emily De Vito · Communications Manager, CDTA
CDTA's live feed. Their Communications Coordinator posting to all employees: 41 reactions, 18 comments.
CDTA, in their words
“One of the quickest ways to make someone disengaged is to keep them out of the loop. Blink has given us a way to include everyone, instantly.”Jaime Kazlo · Head of Communication, CDTA · Albany, New York
The part worth knowing
If your executive team reads one thing about CDTA, we’d want it to be this.
Before Blink, their frontline comms were noticeboards, digital screens, emergency SMS, word of mouth, and posters left on an operator's seat ready for their shift.
They had a SharePoint intranet a few years old, so they built a replacement. Then, with launch in sight, they stopped.
The old one had got to the point where comms and HR wouldn’t tell staff it existed, because they didn’t want anyone using it.
A better intranet wouldn’t have fixed it. Their content was fine. It just sat somewhere a bus operator couldn’t reach, so they shelved the rebuild and went looking for an app.
Four conversations, in this order. Six months from starting the search in January 2022 to going live that June.
Their job was to confirm it was secure and wouldn’t touch the company network. Blink runs outside it entirely.
In lockstep with the union president from scoping through launch, answering privacy concerns directly.
HR, operations and marketing. Jaime called this part easy, because everyone already agreed comms had to change.
With IT, the union and the departments behind it, the case was straightforward.
Their final requirements came down to four things: easy to use, easy to download, able to carry daily news, and able to get an emergency message out fast.
Side by side
Not a lookalike from another industry. The same kind of authority, in the same state, with the same problem.
Albany · four counties
Syracuse · five counties
US public transit on Blink
Six transit authorities across six states already run on Blink, from 100 people to 1,000. Centro sits right in the middle of that group, and everything those six learned is yours from day one.
Built for Centro
We rebuilt TheHub in Blink using your own structure: your Quick Links, your departments, your six locations, your RPM program. It’s live, so instead of watching a demo you can open it and post something.
One click and you’re in. Nothing to type, no password to set up. Forward this page to anyone on the executive team or in IT and they join the same way.
Service alerts, RPM winners and company news, in the order they happened.
Swap Stop and Centro in the Community, owned by Centro instead of living on a personal phone.
Vista timesheets, NeoGov LEARN, Bonfire and the help desks, one tap away with no second password.
A Syracuse detour reaches Syracuse. A maintenance bulletin reaches mechanics.
Acknowledged per person, timestamped, and exportable for an audit.
De-risking it
In a unionized workforce that was wary of a “company app”. Here’s the playbook, and it’s yours to copy.
A group of leaders were shown what the app was for and how to use it with their teams before anyone else saw it. So the first people using it were the ones operators already trusted.
Letters, posters, digital screens. Then face to face, which mattered most: information sessions and break room visits at every location. Emily's framing to staff was “this app is for you, so you're the first to know what's going on”.
They launched on the first day of summer and sent an ice cream truck to each division. Anyone who signed up got a free cone. Contests ran through launch and for a month after.
When people resisted, the comms team sat with them and showed them where to find their tax form, their pay stubs, their vacation booking. Emily's line: some of those people came back a year later asking for the invite again.
Emily asks team leaders for content, runs surveys, and posts a couple of informal posts a month. Her own assessment: it doesn’t take her whole day and you don’t need someone on it around the clock.
Your own version of CDTA's ice cream truck already exists. Stuff The Bus, the Weedsport Speedway event, the open houses, the paratransit training days. Launch alongside something people already turn up for and you’re not asking anyone to adopt software.
The commercials
List prices, so you’ve got a defensible number to put in front of the executive team today.
Estimate your cost
List rates. Your final pricing will be agreed with us.
Every feature in each plan is listed at joinblink.com/pricing, which will display in dollars for you.
Treat these as a ceiling, not a quote. At 550 people across five counties you’re above the point where we price to list, so the figures above are a starting point and the real number is likely lower.
Tell us the license count you’d actually launch with, whether you’d start with one division or all six locations, and whether you’d go annual or multi-year. We’ll come back with pricing written for Centro, in a form the executive team can take to a decision.
You asked for costs both with and without it.
The honest answer needs one input from IT: which Microsoft tier your frontline staff hold, and why.
If they carry a license mainly to reach SharePoint or intranet content, surfacing that read-only through Blink may remove the need for it. That’s a reduction in Microsoft spend set against the Blink cost, not an addition on top.
Tell us the tier and the headcount and we’ll model it properly rather than guess.
Before you shortlist
You’re taking two of five vendors forward. These are the questions that decide it.
CDTA asked the same question and answered it the hard way. They had a SharePoint intranet several years old, and they built a replacement. As launch approached they shelved it, because a better intranet still wouldn’t have reached a bus operator on the road.
TheHub isn’t broken, it’s unreachable. It needs a work desktop inside a Centro building, which excludes every operator and mechanic by design. That’s also why the newest Department News post is from September 2025. The content was never the problem.
CDTA reached 87% without making it mandatory, in a unionized workforce, using the playbook above. Adoption passed 70% within weeks of launch.
The mechanism is simple: put the things people actually want in it, starting with pay information through Vista, and they come for those and stay for the rest.
CDTA is too, and they treated the union as a partner from the start rather than an approval at the end. They worked with the union president through scoping, launch and beyond, and answered the privacy concerns directly: the only purpose of the app is to make every employee feel included.
Today their union president has a profile, uses the app, and can contact the comms team when the union wants to send something to the workforce.
Nor should they, and this came up at CDTA too. Blink has a snooze function that runs automatically during set hours, so notifications pause during driving or shift hours and people catch up on a break or at home.
A critical post stays pinned to the top of the feed until each person acknowledges it, whenever they next open the app.
Blink has a full desktop version, and CDTA put it on computers in their break rooms so anyone without a phone, or who would rather not install anything, can still check in. You already have break room workstations.
Your workspace already exists, built with your own structure and content. CDTA went from starting their search to live in six months, and most of that was choosing rather than building.
Working back from a decision after Labor Day, a launch before the end of the year is comfortable.
Most tools in a shortlist like this began as a desk intranet and added a phone app later. Blink started at the other end, with people who don't have a desk. That's why activation runs off a QR code, a text, or a supervisor sending a link, instead of assuming everyone carries a company email and a Microsoft license. For 550 people across five counties, that's the whole ball game.
The transit record is real rather than adjacent. Pierce Transit, CDTA, SunLine, RTC of Southern Nevada, LANta and Detroit in the States, and Stagecoach, First Bus and Coach USA on the bus side internationally. The near-miss form we showed you came from Stagecoach, where drivers used to queue at a depot for twenty minutes to fill in the paper version.
CDTA is the argument in miniature. Same state, same kind of authority, unionized frontline. They built a replacement SharePoint intranet, shelved it before launch because it still wouldn't reach a bus operator, then reached 87% with Blink without making it mandatory.
Side-by-side comparisons against the tools you're likely seeing are at joinblink.com/compare. And one thing none of them can offer: you can log in to a working Centro workspace today instead of watching a demo of somebody else's.
Path two, for IT and cyber security
What IT needs to assess Blink. This is the same ground CDTA's IT Director covered before signing off.
Where we go next
Each one moves the decision along without committing you to anything.
It’s built and waiting, using your structure and your content. Join through the link below and you’re straight in. Open it on your phone rather than a laptop, because that’s the point.
Which Microsoft tier your frontline staff hold, and why they hold it. That’s the one thing we need to model the licensing question properly for your executive paper.
You’ll be upside down with the state fair until 7 September, so we’ll leave you to it and reconnect the week after. If you want that reference call with another transit authority, say the word and we’ll book it in.
Any questions
No support queue. If something here needs checking, or IT wants a call, come straight to me.
Growth Manager, Blink · London
Tom Webster, your point of contact at Blink. The quickest way to get an answer is to message me directly.