Dorset comms team grab Dragon chance
You may recall at last year’s FirePRO conference that DCLG spoke about an opportunity to get involved with How to Train Your Dragon 2. They had been approached by 20th Century Fox to work together in promoting fire safety at home following the release of the film. At Dorset, we grabbed the opportunity with both hands and our Communication Manager worked alongside our Education Manager to provide an exciting day out for one local school that showcased the education packs we produced to support the film.
The link between fire safety and dragons was easy- within the first five minutes of the film you discover the dragons have moved in with the Vikings! Encouraging pupils to take fire safety advice from two friendly characters like Hiccup and Toothless isn’t hard either. The educational packs are designed for different school age groups with a range of activities for each. They have been made simple for teachers to pick up and use as they are, or they can input their own messages to enhance the learning.
The pupils from Greenford Primary School were invited along to their local cinema for a private screening of the film, followed by a fun filled afternoon of fire safety activities (and of course a squirt of the hose!) at Dorchester Fire Station. They were selected for the support and guidance teachers at the school had provided in developing the national teacher resources.
The teacher education resources are designed to help teach the children important fire safety messages and how to keep themselves safe whilst supporting other skills. They can be found on our website www.dorsetfire.gov.uk
- Emily Cheeseman, Dorset FRS
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.
Joined up Lancs campaign reduces World Cup demand
Lancashire’s Community Safety Strategy Steering Group created a pan-county safety campaign during this year’s FIFA World Cup to help reduce the demands on the fire, police and ambulance services. Our research showed that major football tournaments increase community safety risks, place additional demand on services and cause harm to individuals and communities.
The campaign, which was led by Lancashire Fire & Rescue, Lancashire Constabulary and Lancashire Police and Crime Commissioner’s Office, contained four strands:
· Domestic abuse
· Alcohol-related violent crime
· Drink-driving
· Deliberate and accidental fires
The over-arching aim of the campaign was to mitigate "The Ugly Consequences of the Beautiful Game" by encouraging people to think twice about their behaviour and subsequently minimise harm.
Tactics
To get our safety message across to the public we promoted the campaign on the internet, on social media, radio advertising; safety events and supporting materials were printed such as billboard advertisements, vinyl banners, beer mats and keyrings were distributed.
Outputs and outcomes
· The reach of the media coverage was 289,898 people
· 39 tweets were sent out reaching 788,097 people. The same 39 messages were also sent out on Facebook reaching 10,410 users.
· 641 people visited the Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service website to view information that was specific to the campaign.
· The adverts were played a total of 255 times on Rock FM, Radio Wave, The Bee, 2BR, and The Bay. They reached 664,151 people during the four week campaign
· Approximately 3000 people attended the road safety events.
During the World Cup period, the number of accidental fires, deliberate fires and road traffic collisions that Lancshire FRS attended reduced significantly compared to the year before and during the last World Cup in 2010.
There was a 10% reduction from 2013 in the number of road traffic collisions, there was a 41% decrease in the number of fires started in the kitchen compared to 2010 and the number of deliberate fires has reduced by 38% since this period last year.
- Richard Edney, Lancashire FRS
OfCom report highlights changing communication market
Ofcom's eleventh annual Communications Market Report was published this summer, with some interesting findings which may help inform how fire services communicate with their communities. Key findings included:
- 90% of adults tuned into radio last year
- The amount of TV people watch has fallen below 4 hours for the first time since 2009
- The number of adults with household internet access grew to 82% in 2013
- A ‘millennium generation' of 14-15 year olds are the most technology-savvy people in the UK
You can read the full report on the Ofcom website here
YouGov launches profiling tool
YouGov has launched a new our segmentation and media planning product for agencies and brands, called Profiles. The product is powered by data collected in the YouGov Cube – a bank of data collected from over 200,000 UK YouGov members.
YouGov claim the tool offers 'the profile of your target audience across multi-channel data sets with greater granularity and accuracy than ever before'.
You can try the tool for yourself here