University blaze shows power of integration
Massive disruption, potential danger and the loss of a £20m building is not likely to gain public support – yet the difficult job that Nottinghamshire FRS faced during the GlaxoSmithKline fire achieved just that through integrating communications with plans to resolve the incident.
Communications at Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service (NFRS) has been evolving over the last 12 months to ensure that people understand and back the work that firefighters do to help them in a crisis.
On the night of Friday 12 September, lots of proactive work around the service to demonstrate the value that communications can add in such challenging circumstances came together.
Bridget Aherne, Head of Corporate Communications & Administration at Notts FRS, said: “Firefighters are well-trained to deal with huge devastating fires like this and do an excellent job – but that doesn’t stop the public feeling confused, frightened or speculating as to what the cause was and, as a result, it means they need to be as well warned and informed as they always were but the reassurance needs to come quicker now.
“The speed and trends of communications means that not only do we have to do a good job operationally but that we also have to talk to the community about it and reassure them while we’re we’re doing that job.
“On that night, we were lucky to have someone available – because we don’t have an out-of-hours comms rota – to manage public and media interest that came via traditional and digital channels.”
Control took around 150 calls reporting the blaze due to its scale and ferocity but managed to make a communications professional aware within an hour, when the fire was at eight pumps.
Enough detail was gained to assess that being a university campus, those nearby would likely be a significant group of social media users so messages were put on Facebook and Twitter as well as searches conducted to see what conversations were already taking place.
Many people were already posting pictures and eye witness accounts on Twitter so those conversations were responded to and it meant that the public and media were quickly directed to the official @nottsfire channel and the sharing of official information gained momentum rapidly.
There was a gap in the issue of information – the Notts FRS website is managed through an older version of RedDot and is not instantly updatable remotely so a fuller update, on the main standalone NFRS channel, to those who are not social media users was a notable absence and this is a reputational risk. Facebook was used as a channel to place this more traditional curation of information.
A communications professional initially went to Control and this enabled them to take the press calls from control operators, The impact was limited on Control and the comms officer got the messages as they came in from the incident ground.
This allowed monitoring of where reporters were going to be and when it became apparent that there’d be a significant number covering it live, the communications officer went to the scene to conduct traditional media relations, work with the incident commander (IC) to assess how best to handle the combined social and traditional media given current activity at the scene and gather material safely to support management of both.
Updates were posted on social media throughout the evening, a media facility with the IC conducted at the cordon and all interest dealt with, meaning that essential safety information was widely shared, the work of firefighters was well communicated and public support gained through that reassurance.
Monitoring and evaluation took place throughout the rest of the weekend, allowing communications to work with principal officers to manage a potential reputational issue – the following week, the Fire Authority was deciding on proposals to remove resources from the same area so it was essential to communicate the fire had been tackled by crews from all over the county and the two issues had begun to be linked. This was handled by releasing the full time line of the operation- see here and also here.
That proactive approach to monitoring and shaping the continuing interest in the incident helped prevent speculation, protected the integrity of the investigation and protected not only Notts FRS’ reputation but that of the university and other partners as the community began its recover from the loss.
Importantly, many of the people reached that night have now become permanently engaged with Notts FRS (for example, around 500 new followers were gained on Twitter), meaning regular community safety updates should reach those people.