Public Fire Education Planning

Public Fire Education Planning: A Five-Step Process describes a systematic approach to designing, implementing, and evaluating community safety education programs. This manual will help those of you who are new to community safety education understand some of the basic concepts about how to get started with an organization’s community safety education programs. It also will assist you with some hints and techniques on a variety of topics, such as methods for locating partners to assist with community education or techniques for locating resources for your safety programs.

Five-Step Process Summary

Step 1: Conduct a Community Risk Analysis

A community risk analysis is a process that identifies fire and life safety problems and the demographic characteristics of those at risk in a community.

Step 2: Develop Community Partnerships

A community partner is a person, group, or organization willing to join forces and address a community risk. The most effective risk reduction efforts are those that involve the community in the planning and solution process.

Step 3: Create an Intervention Strategy

An intervention strategy is the beginning of the detailed work necessary for the development of a successful fire or life safety risk reduction process. The most successful risk reduction efforts involve combined prevention interventions:

• Education: Providing information (facts) about risk and prevention.
• Engineering: Using technology to create safer products or modifying the environment where the risk is occurring.
• Enforcement: Rules that require the use of a safety initiative.

Step 4: Implement the Strategy

Implementing the strategy involves testing the interventions and then putting the plan into action in the community. It is essential that the implementation is well-coordinated and sequenced appropriately. Implementation occurs when the intervention strategy is put in place and the implementation plan schedules are followed.

Step 5: Evaluate the Results

The primary goal of the evaluation process is to demonstrate that the risk reduction efforts are reaching target populations, have the planned impact, and are demonstrably reducing loss. The evaluation plan measures performance on several levels, outcome, impact, and process objectives.

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