Country Fire Service
What’s your plan when a bushfire starts?
Service
ReputationOur Expertise
Strategy, Integrated campaign
Introduction
Too many of us think disaster only happens to other people. And it’s this complacent attitude that leads to tragedy during bushfire season. Since 2017, NATION has worked closely with the South Australian Country Fire Service on the annual ‘Bushfire Ready’ campaign, reminding at-risk audiences to stay vigilant.
A long-term, evolving strategy.
It’s been a privilege to collaborate with this important client to create behavioural change that could potentially save lives. Our long-term strategy has stayed in place every year but has allowed us to change tactics and executions to respond to environmental conditions and community emotions. This was particularly helpful during Black Summer and post-COVID where communities were still reeling from so much local and global unrest.
Steps to survival.
We’ve pivoted our creative over the years to ensure we hit the challenge of the time, every time and in doing this, we’ve achieved so much…We prompted people to question their own attitudes around bushfires and what they would actually do in a crisis. We got their bushfire plans out of their heads and onto paper with a newly written, consolidated ‘5 Minute Bushfire Plan’ that got thousands more downloads than the previous years. We haunted people into action with an emotional, earworm song that encouraged them to also think about their kids and pets in a bushfire. We empathised with them as individuals and communities as they faced issues of resilience and trauma in the wake of global change and local isolation. And we broke down complex thoughts and tasks into actionable steps so that yearly bushfire planning and preparation would be adopted by as many South Australians as possible.
Long-term success.
Steady increases to campaign KPIs have been met each season since NATION were appointed and there has been a marked shift towards an active-preparedness and maintenance stage of behaviour change.
In 2022-23, the campaign was recalled by two-thirds of the at-risk population, and importantly, those who recalled the campaign were more likely to be prepared for bushfires. Four in five also said the campaign made them think about their bushfire preparedness, including making or reviewing their bushfire plan.
Each year, we’ve worked with the CFS to set new benchmarks, with the 2022/23 season having the highest benchmarks ever set. And we exceeded them.
