As mentioned in a previous post, the volunteer fire service is facing a 30 year low in membership, and at the same time a 30 year high in emergency calls.
The simple answer to this problem is recruit more people. The hard part is how do we do
this?
A partial answer is that you and your department need to publicize the service you provide your community. If they don't know you exist, how will you ever recruit any of them to join.
One strategy to increasing publicity involves the two scariest words to older firefighters: social media.
Now I know a lot of fire departments and companies have many middle aged or older members who either only dip their toe into social media or are still using flip phones like it's 2005. Let me try to explain why well managed social media can be your friend.
In general there three big social media platforms you should be trying to publicize through. They are Facebook with 2.41 billion monthly active users, Instagram with 1 billion monthly active users and Twitter with 330 million monthly active users, according to data from Statista.
These platforms are more focused on different aspects, such as how Instagram is more visual while Twitter is more textual and Facebook is a bit of both.
If you browse through fire departments' social media accounts it will often show a barren wasteland of old and sporadic posts with no rhyme or reason besides whoever has the account login though "well, this looks cool." The platforms can be used more efficiently by creating a posting schedule that will detail what posts are going up, what day they will go up, and at what time.
Even better is to create posting campaigns about certain topics for particular times of the year. Since fire prevention week is in October how about once a week all month a post is made giving the public a fire safety tip using either photos and text or short form videos. Be informed that if you want to do short form videos you will want to keep them at most 60 seconds in length because that is Instagram's video length.
There are a ton of other PSA ideas for posts throughout the year, such as reminding people to change their smoke and gas detector batteries when daylight savings comes around or reminding people to get their chimney's cleaned before winter to prevent chimney fires.
These organized posts can be used for recruitment drives because it allows your department to show instead of tell residents how much maintenance and training goes into the volunteer fire service. You can highlight the needs of your department and tell individual volunteer firefighters' stories about why they joined and what they get out of it.
Now before you get into all the fun stuff with social media that was just described their needs to be a set of best practices and procedures in place before you starting posting like crazy and somehow get your department in trouble from the all seeing NJ Division of Fire Safety. Have a set group that will plan and post, and have access to the social media accounts. In addition, have either the administrative president or chief or someone else have the final say into what gets posted.
If you treat social media well, it will treat you well back by publicizing your department without having to spend money on advertising.
See you at the big one
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