Phone Use Touches Public With Fire Safety Message
Fire departments have been using the telephone to receive alarms for many years, and yet the telephone has not been used as a tool to give out information with a great deal of success. What I am talking about is the use of the telephone as a public education device for a fire department.
When the telephone first became popular there were not a lot of them around, but obviously their advantages were recognized. They were the first electronic device that was able to give the fire department specific information on what kind of an emergency the department was going to face when it rolled to the scene.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge (and out of the end of hose lines) since the invention of the telephone. We’ve seen telephone alarm systems installed, the 911 system has now started to spread across the United States, and in recent years we’ve even seen the use of digital alarm equipment which transmits extensive information over telephone circuits to fire alarm receiving centers.
Better way sought
During the last Fire Prevention Week, the San Clemente, Calif., Fire Department decided to try to use a new and better way to reach a diverse segment of our community with fire prevention education messages.
We all know that in any public education program it is extremely important to hit upon all the elements of society. If you set up a program for children, you basically only get to the children. If you set up a program through the men’s clubs, basically you only get to the men’s clubs. It seems like most of these public education programs have a limit to the numbers and range of individuals that you can impact in a short period of time.
Someone suggested that we take a page out of the politicians’ book. How about a telephone poll or survey, with the follow-up public education message determined by the survey? Most of you have received a phone call at least once in your lives where someone asked you a few simple questions to help complete a survey for a political campaign, advertising campaign or other public opinion purpose.
Fire Fighter Tim Wright, the public education officer for our department, was responsible for the activities during Fire Prevention Week last October. Wright, with other staff members in the department, devised a list of fire prevention measures that we wanted to survey in our community. They were converted to questions that were reproduced in the illustration of the form used during our telephone survey. The project was labeled Fire Stop-B. This was an acronym derived from fire fighters involved in residentially engineered systems technology organized to provide benefits.
Women asked to help
Members of the San Clemente Junior Women’s Club were asked if they would cooperate in conducting this telephone survey poll during Fire Prevention Week. Their public safety chairman agreed that it would be an excellent public service project for the community. Arrangements were made for several of the members to come to Fire Headquarters during the middle of the week’s activities. Under the direction of Wright, six of the women used a criss-cross telephone directory to make random samplings of all of the neighborhoods in the city. This directory was arranged so that we could cross-reference telephone numbers with addresses and addresses with telephone numbers. An attempt was made to take a random sample of all the homes represented in the community.
San Clemente is a beach-oriented residential community. There is a range of homes from apartment houses to million-dollar residences. Working carefully with the telephone directory, the project team attempted to get a reasonable percentage of telephone contacts out of each neighborhood to represent the complete range of homes.
Most people cooperate
Results of the telephone survey were most gratifying. The women reported that only one out of every eight persons answering the telephone declined to answer the questions that were posed. Many of the women, while engaged in conversation with the individuals, found that the persons were asking even more questions than they were answering.
Over a period of about four hours, the six women were able to contact several hundred homes. The results of this survey indicated that most of the fire prevention programs that we had conducted in the community had impacted at least 50 percent of the homes. This was reflected by the fact that at least half of the homes had some detectors, had telephone stickers directly on their telephones, or were aware of our Vial of Life and other programs.
After the survey was completed, the telephone numbers were cross-referenced against addresses. Those individuals who responded to the questionnaire with a lack of important information were sent a follow-up letter containing additional information in the areas indicated. For example, if the person said he or she did not have a telephone sticker on the telephone and didn’t know the emergency telephone number, then a sticker was sent to that person. If the individual indicated he or she didn’t know about home exit drills or wasn’t aware of smoke detector technology, etc., then a specific package of that information was sent. In some cases, the individuals received one of everything. In other cases, they only received a minimum amount of information.
Cost-effective operation
As a result of this survey, we estimated that we contacted a representative sample of over 550 people in the community. This was a far more cost-effective use of manpower than many of the public education programs where we have gone door to door, consuming fuel and causing wear and tear on our fire apparatus.
This doesn’t mean that these kinds of programs will meet other public education needs. Our department engages in many other public relations activities that require our actual participation out in the community. We still maintain an active inspection program and are attempting to make as many contacts through it as possible.
The use of the telephone survey was extremely productive for evaluating the effect of these programs. I’m sure many of us have had the sinking sensation of watching someone collect fire prevention literature off a table or a demonstration without ever looking at it or learning from it. The Fire Stop-B Telephone Survey tested the system to see if information gets to where it is supposed to get—into the home.
An interesting sidelight of this program was that the Junior Women’s Club was successful in getting people to talk about the issues on the questionnaire. Many of the women had children of their own and could discuss such things as how to conduct an exit drill, how to teach a young child to use the telephone for emergency purposes and other children-related matters.
Open house held
All of those who responded to the questionnaire were given an invitation at the end of the discussion to attend an open house at the San Clemente Fire Department on Saturday morning to end Fire Prevention Week. At that open house, all participants were invited to pick up a decal that exemplified the Fire Stop-B project. Well over 700 people participated in the open house.
We feel that the telephone survey was an extremely useful part of the public education program of our department. It tested the area in which we are least sucpessful in most fire prevention campaigns: It got us into the home. Granted, we weren’t able to conduct an inspection of the facilities. Generally speaking, most fire departments are not particularly successful in getting that accomplished anyway.
What it did do was to open up the channel of communication between our department and the citizens that we serve. As an offshoot of Fire Stop-B, several people have come to the department asking for additional information based on the questionnaire. Several of the elderly people we contacted through the telephone survey have been added to the YANA (you are not alone) check program.
Of course, a telephone cannot eliminate a fire hazard. A person on the other end of the line can always tell you one thing and then do something else because they don’t have to face you eye-to-eye on fire prevention. Nonetheless, we found the telephone to be a useful tool among others in spreading the word on fire prevention. The next time that you are thinking about a public education program, remember what the telephone company has been telling us for years: “Let your fingers do the walking.”
