But what about marketing within?

After nearly two decades of being on my volunteer department I’ve started noticing a frightening trend amongst our members – low attendance. And I’m not just talking about the boring and mundane weekly truck / station maintenance. I’m talking about emergency incidents and training.

The same ten or so people out of a 30-person roster keep showing up for everything, while the others seem to show up periodically. Some I haven’t seen in months (literally).

I had always heard of this strange phenomenon from other departments, but had never been witness to it myself until last year and most of 2009.

So what gives? Where is everyone? What’s the causes and how do we turn things around?

I think the causes are many and some just can’t be explained. I know one reason for our department is because a good portion of our roster is getting older which means more family involvement. The kids are getting older and are in sports and events. They can take longer vacations because the kids don’t need to be looked after so much.

The other causes or reasons are a bit of a mystery to me and I even posed the question in the FireLink forums. Although the response was minimal, one particular response caught my attention.

“The sad fact is some people just don’t enough pride in themselves, their fellow firefighters or their department to really make a difference. They are just shirts.”

I agree to an extent with some, while others I think have just lost interest in one form or another. Sure, they’ll be there for the “big one” and show up to the more glitzy and glamorous events, but ask them to attend a sit-down training or help with the more repetitive and mundane tasks and it’s like pulling teeth.

My initial thought(s)? Market within. Make the department such a neat place to be and be part of that people can’t resist coming around. Here is a short list of ideas I’ve come up with.

• Competition: Firefighters are for the most part type-A personalities and are competitive. Have an annual award for the firefighter with the highest attendance
• More competition: Divide your roster into even teams with a captain leading each and see which team can perform the best. The losers have to buy the winners dinner or give them a cookout or something
• Compliment and encourage: Being a leader means you have to look at every member of the department and periodically remind them just how important their job is and how good they are at doing it
• Make the station a focal point: For most volunteer departments the fire station has always been a focal point. Maybe it’s lost some of that luster and it’s high time you make it the central gathering point for firefighters and the community alike
• Re-Think Training: Train, train, train, it’s what we do. We know we should and more often. But with any volunteer department it gets harder and harder to keep up with local training, let alone the constant barrage of government required trainings now mandatory for all departments. Maybe we need to re-think how the trainings are handled? Offer a dinner before or after? Train more in the public view possibly?
• Compensate: I know, money should be the last thing on a firefighters mind when doing this job and I also know some can’t even fathom paying their volunteers what with budget cuts and all, but maybe a little extra dough in one’s pocket is an incentive that could help
• Do it for the kids: Maybe integrate a junior firefighter program along with your fire prevention program to ensure the future of the department

What else? Any other thoughts? Ideas?

Now I want to look the domain name of your department and see how you can best utilize it to market your department. If you don’t have a website, you might want to get in contact with us and see how we can help.

The Internet is being touted as the greatest change in communication since movable type was invented and I would have to agree. No other era had the opportunity to communicate as fast, as much and as often as we can now. From social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, we are living during a communication revolution like no other.

So how do you combine a fire truck and a website? You put the URL in reflective lettering on every apparatus.

I think one of the best spots to do so would be on the back door/panels of the truck. Why, you might ask? Because so many people are migrating to mobile Internet, it would be easy for them to look up your site while sitting in traffic stuck behind your apparatus.

The second best spot would be on each side of the truck in the same spot. So if you have a blank panel at the top, put it there on both sides. Or if you have reflective striping down the sides, that would be a good spot also. This gives you more exposure because the URL can be seen from either side.

And the last spot to consider would be the front face of the truck or the bug guard. And the only reason it’s listed last is because not too many people are going to be able to read it as they pass or read it in their rear view mirror.

Hopefully now you have an idea of how to market your department and the website to customers more than just word of mouth.

Let’s start with the most simplest task to complete, but one that many fail to pay attention to. Cleanliness. A dusty and dirty fire truck in the station is one thing, but what if you get a call and have to drive it out on the road? There you are, making all sorts of noise and drawing attention to yourselves and the citizens (your customers) see a muddy, dust covered truck that they’re hard earned tax dollars help pay for.

Worse yet, no one takes the time to wash it and you travel to another city/town to participate in a parade and no one even wants to approach your truck because they are afraid to get dirty.

Now that you’re thinking about your apparatus and realize you can’t remember the last time you gave your fleet a good wash-down, how do you go about implementing some sort of schedule or habit to get the job done?

Years ago one of my chief’s implemented an on/off schedule of washing trucks during our weekly work details and it works out quite well. Every other week we washed either the entire fleet or maybe just a grass rig because no other trucks needed it.

Here are my suggestions for implementing a truck maintenance schedule:

1.) Assign or find volunteers to be in charge of one particular apparatus

2.) Have weekly or bi-monthly details to wash / maintain the entire fleet

3.) Develop a schedule for washing the fleet

You should consider the idea of clean apparatus as important as the dress uniforms you wear to an important event. It says a lot about your image and exactly who your department is.

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