Fire Safety Feedback
FEATURES
FIRE PREVENTION
Portland uses material rewards to encourage kids to show how well they’re learning from televised fire safety programs.
Hope isn’t enough.
When we stand before any group of civilians and speak to them about fire safety, we hope we’re making them aware of the dangers of fire, what can be done to prevent fires, and how to escape in the event a fire occurs.
Our hope that we’re succeeding isn’t enough to justify our time or their presence. Open eyes and nodding heads aren’t enough to assure us that we’re teaching and they’re learning. We need more than that to determine how well we’re actually doing our jobs.
To be sure an audience is learning new information, and not simply drawing responses from a previous body of knowledge, we must first learn something ourselves: how much our students already know. Then, at the end of our instructional efforts, we must do our learning from them again, this time to determine how much they now know. The difference in the amount of knowledge held by our audience at each of those two times is the measure of the teaching and learning that have occurred.
At that same time, from the persistence of incorrect responses to questions based on the material presented, we can also find out what we have not succeeded in teaching, so that we can improve our presentations.
This process is a component of an educational loop essential to those who would be successful educators.
It’s possible to construct survey instruments to get this information by “testing” a population before and after a program to determine if any learning has taken place. These surveys involve a great amount of work, and to assure validity, they must be designed as random samples for a given population.
This system of pre-testing and post-testing doesn’t have to be written, but it must be some method that will measure and document evidence of learning.
This fundamental requirement for feedback is as strong when we use television as our instructional tool as it is when we’re eyeball-toeyeball with our audiences. Most of us recognize that television can be very valuable for getting our message to the largest number of individuals with the least amount of effort. But all too often, we succumb to that “least amount of effort” temptation to ignore the fact that we need solid evidence that learning is taking place, that what we’re doing is truly “educational.”
We’ve found in Portland, Ore., that it takes a while to develop an effective feedback mechanism.
Portland was one of the first cities to take part in a new concept that involved television’s news rather than its public affairs departments to develop special fire safety programs with broad audience appeal. The concept was an outgrowth of minidocumentaries promoted in California by the U.S. Fire Administration and Jim Vidakovich, a consultant with experience on the Children’s Television Workshop, which produces “Sesame Street.” He and USFA information officer Don Mayer “sold” the television station on the benefits of producing a minidocumentary that would concentrate on fire problems in the Portland area.
(Since then, many other stations across the country have produced and aired excellent programs of their own which have helped raise awareness in these communities of fire hazards, fire prevention techniques, and survival skills.)
Because the fire service’s perspective had centered on the educational potential as the rationale for producing these minidocumentaries in the first place, we assumed that these programs were educating the public.
We expected appropriate reductions in fire incidents and their seriousness to occur as a result. However, in many cases, when such reductions were noted, we discovered we couldn’t demonstrate that they were a direct result of our educational efforts rather than merely a matter of favorable circumstances.
We wanted to measure the educational impact of the program, not simply hope that our program was the cause of the reduction in fire incidents. To demonstrate that our audience was actually learning something from the program, we had to trace changes in the behavior back to the content of the program.
Through the coordinated efforts of the television station, the local school system, and the local fire service community, a checksheet for the viewing audience was developed to accompany the next television series produced. More than 50 separate agencies from Oregon and nearby southwest Washington took part in our effort to document the tangible results.
These were the crucial elements of our campaign, designed to reach even the youngest schoolage child:
- We distributed the checksheet, with its multiple-choice questions, through fire departments and schools, with maximum student participation in the project as the goal.
- Students were asked to watch the television program with their families to learn the proper response to each question on the checksheet.
- The television program was produced and edited to match the educational content of the checksheet. Specific fire safety behaviors were chosen; the producers were asked to develop creative packages with the flair to attract and hold audience interest.
- When the pieces ran as special topics during the evening news, students were asked to return their completed checksheets to their schools. Fire service representatives collected them and tabulated the results.
That first effort in 1984 was not successful by any of the measures we had fashioned. Of 130,000 checksheets distributed, only 200 were returned.
Although cooperation among agencies was a positive result of the project, that alone wasn’t enough to justify continuation. And we didn’t know how we could show the television station that we could attract a large viewing audience for the special programming when so few checksheets were returned.
Only then did we realize we had failed to motivate young students to participate and return completed checksheets. We had let our own enthusiasm and knowledge blind us to the reality: Our interest in the subject is not automatically shared by others.
To encourage more participation, two new ideas were added in 1985 to the steps followed in our first campaign.
A popular local restaurant chain, Skippers, agreed to provide a free child’s meal for each completed checksheet returned to its restaurants. And a grand prize was offered through a drawing. Three 10speed bicycles were given away to grand prize winners, who were chosen on the basis of their answers to an essay question which acted as a bonus at the end of the multiple-choice checksheet. Each checksheet had to be at least 70 percent correct to be eligible for the grand prize drawing.
The television station started to lose interest when the returns amounted to only 1,000 checksheets, much better than the first year but still well short of our goal.
We quickly learned that spreading the programs over a nineweek, once-a-week format wasn’t popular with parents and simply failed to hold the interest of young children.
In 1986, we shortened the series to one week and sweetened the pot with more prizes and more promotion from the TV station. We used a five-part series on the evening news, with the program material repeated on a weekend children’s program.
More than 2,000 checksheets came back, and with them, some positive feedback from parents and students. And while doubling the total responses may sound impressive, the fact that our distribution was still 130,000 copies made us realize we needed to push the program a little harder.
This year, we decided to change TV stations to the local ABC affiliate, largely because it was willing to provide additional promotion for the fire safety program.
And although some fire service organizations dropped their support, this year has been our best yet, with more than 5,000 completed checksheets returned without any additional expense or prizes. The station’s added promotion was an important factor in more than doubling our returns once again.
We’re rapidly approaching what marketing people refer to as a very positive redemption rate. More important, the program has caught on with the local community and we expect increased participation in coming years.
Pleased with the response, the television station is talking about a long partnership which will make this an annual event. The corporate sponsor is pleased to be identified with a program that draws positive community support, and naturally happy that participating children are bringing their parents in to eat with them when they come to claim their free meal.
Participating students appreciate the fact that they receive something of value for their safety efforts. Material reward is a fire safety motivation they can understand.
Remember, we wanted to provide the mayor and the chief with a tangible product which shows evidence of learning. The checksheets aren’t absolutely conclusive and can’t be linked totally to the television program, but they’re an important first step in providing a form of response that indicates education is taking place.
Awareness costs one amount; behavior change costs much more.
One weak link remains in the fact that we’re not able to document previous bodies of knowledge in our viewing audience. We may be able to provide the before and after surveys as the program progresses; for now, we’re satisfied we have a working part of our educational loop, a response activity.
Marketing professionals will remind us that awareness costs one amount; behavior change costs much more. If we want the community to “buy” our product, to change its behavior, we must take more time and effort.
But perhaps not too much more money. Portland’s Citizen Budget Advisory Committee is pleased that we were able to leverage a media campaign worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from existing staff time and $160 worth of appreciation plaques. Meanwhile, our corporate sponsors want to expand the program to two states next year and offer a family trip to Disneyland as the grand prize.
When we find a corporate sponsor for the plaques, what started as a progarm concept of the U.S. Fire Administration will have completed a transition to a self-supporting program without support from the public sector.
