This will get you any job you ever want.
The words of the preeminent Zander Mills, a legend of the fire and rescue service communications world, and a very good friend, as he handed me our first ever South Yorkshire Fire Campaign Highlights document.
by Jack Grasby
This was six years ago and, as it goes, his words were pretty accurate.
The document in question was a 28-page booklet that summarised some of the communications and engagement work our small-but-mighty team had done in the past year.
At the time it was somewhat of a unicorn. When you work in a fast-paced communications role, evaluating work is something you always want to do, but don’t often get the time. Even a one pager of evaluation is something many of us only get to produce once in a blue moon.
And that’s why a shiny, glossy and proud booklet gives you a massive boost in the interview room, when on the hunt for new jobs. Not that I was.
But that’s not why we did it.
We wanted to shine a light on the impact our work was having in the communities we serve, and to demonstrate to stakeholders—internally and externally—that our communications work wasn’t just about creative outputs, but real-world outcomes.
For me, every part of our services should be able to evidence the difference we’re all making.
It's important we learn lessons, too. Because as proud as we were of what we’d achieved over those 12 months, we wanted to do more, and get better.
And that’s why six years on, in a new role for me and a new, albeit neighbouring, fire service, I’ve produced a Campaign Highlights booklet of my own.
Within it are some of the key lessons we’ve learned over the last 12 months, which we’ll be using to improve our work going forward—and ultimately, to better serve the people who rely on us most.
Below, without the help of ChatGPT (that’s a promise), I’ve summarised them, in the hope others might be able to utilise our learning!
1. Email is a more powerful communication tool than we thought
It’s paled into insignificance as an ‘old’ and ‘routine’ communication channel. Or so I thought.
After toying with the idea for quite some time and being inspired by my old service which spearheaded the idea, 2024 saw us launch a smoke alarm testing reminder service, by email.
This was a simple concept that allowed members of the public to sign up for a weekly note, every Tuesday, that reminded them to test their smoke alarms.
Behaviour change is difficult, and tracking whether people are paying attention to your messages around smoke alarms is always tough. Only a crystal ball will ever be able to tell us if our smoke alarm campaign has truly saved someone’s life.
But at least by using email, we could track the amount of people who not only received our reminders but engaged with them too. And this tracking has made for interesting reading.
We’re in a world where social media has become far more than just an ‘emerging’ communication channel. It’s arguably our primary channel, now.
But we’re all small fish in a very big pond and, as our data showed, only 6 percent of people who our social posts were reaching were engaging with them.
Our emails, on the other hand, had a much better engagement rate. Of those receiving them, 53 percent of people were opening and taking on board our messages.
That’s a big difference!
2. You can learn lessons from even your most successful projects
Last year we ran a consultation exercise, where we asked the public to give us their views on our strategic plan for the next three years.
As projects go, it was a record-breaker. For the first time in my service’s history we ran the exercise entirely in-house, saving £23,000 in the process, and still generated 658 percent more responses than our previous exercise of a similar nature.
Yet, however successful it was, and however many records we broke, there were still things we could have done differently and/or better.
When you’ve worked hard on something for a while it can be difficult to process constructive feedback, but it’s essential if we want to get better.
Just don’t forget the positives!
3. Audience insight is, and always will be, invaluable
I’ve long been a fan of the Government Communication Service’s OASIS model, and have long championed using audience insight to underpin your communications work.
Typically this is associated with campaigns work, such as firefighter recruitment, where you can try to apply things such as the EAST model and nudge theory.
But lately I’ve realised that audience insight applies to, well, pretty much everything.
Last year we were asked to host the Asian Fire Service Association’s Summer Conference in Nottingham. This was a huge honour, but also a huge task.
One of the first things we did was attend the AFSA Winter Conference in Leeds. This was the event before ours. We spoke to as many people as we could, and hoovered up as much knowledge as possible.
We then applied the learning to everything from the positioning of tables to the conference agenda, to try and make it as smooth and insightful for every single attendee.
The results spoke for themselves, with post-event feedback being overwhelmingly positive and our event ‘setting a new template’ for future conferences.
Audience insight doesn’t just apply to campaigns – it can transform everything you do.
4. Internal consultation can be tiring – but it’s worth it
To avoid criticism – say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
As stated in my second point, it’s extremely frustrating when you work hard on something only to have holes picked in it.
That’s why we made the mistake of rushing through our internal service rebrand. Quite simply, there was only so much feedback we could take. Or more specifically, there was only so much feedback we wanted to take!
But whether you ask for it or not, people will still give you their views, and holes will be picked not just after the horse has bolted, but after the race has finished, too.
After many years of my organisation having no clear or consistent brand, to the point rogue PowerPoint templates were being circulated and used at will, our work to bring in a modern look, which connected to our roots and was based on staff insight, has proved transformative.
However, much of the great work has been overshadowed by minor issues and details that have been picked up since the launch.
Perhaps if I’d have been a little braver, these could have been ironed out before we went live.
5. Simplicity is everything!
This one is perhaps obvious, but a reminder is always helpful!
One of my first projects when I joined Nottinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service in May 2023 was to review our internal communications work.
Not for lack of trying, or for lack of commitment and effort, our existing channel offering was cluttered and lacked consistency. Staff told us there was too much going on, and they couldn’t keep up.
After lots of conversations we started the process of trying to crack the nut of internal communication. As a team we debated how we could get to the promised land of having a workforce that feels truly informed (spoiler alert – we’ve still not got there).
What we ultimately settled on was a simple solution – boiling our internal communication down to three key channels and using a traffic light system to make them super clear.
Our offer now includes a weekly briefing sheet (important information), a monthly newsletter (celebrating our successes and slowly reinforcing our strategic goals), and immediate news updates (urgent) – and that’s it.
We’re not there yet, and our internal engagement is far from perfect, but so far we’ve doubled our newsletter readership, seen consistently good numbers on our weekly briefing sheets, and built a strong pool of evidence that shows our immediate news updates are being read by the majority of our staff.
As the old saying goes – keep it simple, stupid!
UnAward winner Jack Grasby is senior communications manager at Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service
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