Faced with the challenge of recruiting more on call firefighters, Hertfordshire County Council tapped into the excitement of the Premier League’s transfer deadline day to reach their audience and attract new talent. Communications Officer Grace Fordham explains what they did.
The challenge
In Hertfordshire, half of our fire crews are staffed by part-time firefighters. They provide an ‘on call’ service alongside their normal jobs and are ready to respond to an emergency at any time. It’s a difficult role to recruit for, as firefighters have to live or work within four minutes of a fire station and be available to respond to an incident for an average of 90 hours a week. The difficulties we have experienced in recruiting for these roles has meant that we have had to request engines from neighbouring towns, which can impact on the speed that we are able to respond to calls. To help address this, we set ourselves the target of raising awareness of the role across Hertfordshire and recruiting 18 applications from local people for on-call fire fighter positions between 31 August and 31 October 2017.
The solution
We started with a thorough research phase. We spoke with other fire and rescue services who agreed that there was a lack of public awareness about the existence of the on-call role. We also spoke with our own on-call crews to better understand how they had found out about the role, what had attracted them to it and what aspects they enjoyed the most. This insight helped us to conclude that word of mouth had played a big aspect in raising awareness. We also learned that many on-call firefighters took up the role in order to help their communities, work as part of a team and maintain their fitness levels.
We used this information to develop our communication strategy. We decided to target men and women, over the age of 18 living within suitable locations across Hertfordshire. We also decided to maximise the ‘word of mouth’ element identified by our research, so we focused our efforts on creating engaging, shareable social media content that would generate a digital conversation.
With excitement building over the summer around the Premier League’s transfer window we decided to link our campaign to its culmination: deadline day. We not only felt that aligning the two would highlight the similarities between being part of a football team and being part of a fire service team, but we also felt that sports fans would be a key part of our target audience as they would be more likely to be interested in physical activity.
We decided to create a video parodying the over-the-top deadline day announcements, with ours announcing the ‘signing’ of a new on-call firefighter. The video carried football-themed messaging such as ‘we need you this season’ and ‘see who’s joined our line up’, and moved between action scenes to more comic ones to make the video something that people would want to share. We teased our digital audiences with news of an upcoming announcement about our new signing in the run up to deadline day, working with other fire and rescue service partners to create a buzz about our announcement.
We officially launched the campaign on deadline day, tying into the excitement of conversation across social media and on sports channels and radio stations. We premiered our full video across all of our social media channels, we contacted key influencers to ask them to share our video and even attended Watford FC’s training ground to promote the video and recruitment push in person. We shared images of firefighters holding up Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue shirts while football clubs were releasing their images of new signings holding up club shirts. We ran articles in local newspapers and magazines and put up on-call firefighters for radio interviews, all promoting how people could sign up.
The impact
We achieved significant coverage of our campaign. Our chief fire officer was interviewed live on Sky Sports on deadline day, giving us an opportunity to promote it to a national audience. In the first six days of the campaign our video was viewed 68,638 times and we recorded 2,226 unique visitors to the campaign page, with 1,279 visits to the application page. Since the start of the campaign, we have received 64 applications for on-call firefighter roles – enough to fill more than three training cohorts of 18 firefighters.
Why it worked / how we’re sustaining it
The campaign’s success lay in our understanding of what would attract our target audience to apply to become an on-call firefighter, and going directly to somewhere they would be – online on deadline day. By aligning our campaign with something already generating widespread excitement and coverage, we could take our content directly to people who would have an interest in our work, rather than trying to find them in other environments. A focus on video also helped us to keep the content accessible and shareable.
We now have content we can use biannually to coincide with biannual training for new on-call recruits: in the winter and summer transfer windows.
Our next push is planned for January’s deadline day.
Lessons learned
Go to where the conversation is. We anticipated the #deadlineday trend based on knowledge of previous years’ coverage, as well as ongoing transfer news hitting it big on Twitter and Facebook. We knew we could rely on existing conversation online to propel our video towards people using the hashtag #deadlineday.
Reach out to your followers. We had a few famous followers who might be relevant to the campaign, so as soon as we launched the video, we got to work direct messaging them on Twitter asking for retweets – making it as easy as possible. Watford fan and Radio 1 DJ Chris Stark shared our video, as did national sports journalists.
Create on-genre content. We used our own resources to create a wealth of content to fit in with our football theme, including ‘walk-up’ videos and shirt-holding photos. We wanted the ‘join our team’ metaphor to carry through all of our messages and content for the first week, before we moved towards broader content.
Focus on local coverage. National/regional coverage is great, but local coverage was very important for this campaign because we specifically needed to attract people within 4 minutes of their fire station. To make it as easy as possible for people reading local news in their paper or online, we gave editors lists of on-call stations in their local area.
Provide good digital content to media outlets. News outlets, whether local or regional, are always on the lookout for good digital content they can share on social media and embed in their articles. While broadcast media reaches a lot of people, it’s much easier for people to click an ‘apply here’ link in the post they are reading than to search ‘on-call firefighter Hertfordshire’ after hearing our news story. What’s more is, we could monitor exactly where people were coming from with the use of trackable links.
Be inclusive. We were aware that we didn’t want to contribute to any preconceptions about the fire service as a male-dominated culture by using football to market the role, so we used a female firefighter to star in our video, as well as a mixture of male and female case studies in the local press. We had a number of female applicants as a result of the campaign, which was a welcome outcome in improving diversity in our fire service.
Want to know more?
For more information please contact Grace Fordham, Communications Officer, or David Barlow, Communications Account Manager, at Hertfordshire County Council.