Daylight saving kicks off campaign to get Kiwis installing and checking their smoke alarms

In the week leading up to daylight saving weekend, we’re continuing with Firefighters Don’t Like Fire Movies to motivate Kiwis to push the button to check their smoke alarms are working. Research tells us the ads are seen as particularly believable and relevant by the public.

We’ll be supporting the call to action with powerful house ‘fire facts’:

• You’re four times more likely to survive a house fire if you have working smoke alarms
• Smoke from a house fire can kill you in less than three minutes

After daylight saving weekend, we’ll inform New Zealand households on where they should install working smoke alarms. Our fire safety messaging will be prominent at smoke alarm retailers (such as Warehouse and Mitre 10) to encourage people to buy enough smoke alarms for their households and to install them in the right places.

We’ll deliver our message via TV ads, radio, digital, outdoor and will make a range of social media assets available for you to use.

Finally, we’ll be creating an exhibition of burnt items from real house fires, inspired by real people’s stories. These will be made to look like historic artefacts you’d typically find in a museum. All items will have a message written on a plaque, explaining how they perished. The payoff will be that the owners survived the blaze thanks to having working smoke alarms in the right places. We will provide another update on this initiative closer to the time.

As part of Fire and Emergency, you play an important advocacy role by encouraging your networks and community to install and check their smoke alarms.

The launch of this campaign is a good time to offer your services and expertise through our Home Fire Safety Visits(external link) intervention programme. We’ve developed resources to help you share our messages; they are available on the Risk Reduction bookshelf(external link) and in the Facebook Admins Group (if you are a Facebook Admin for a local Facebook page and you haven’t done so already, please join the Facebook Admin group for regular updates on campaigns and content to share: Fire and Emergency NZ Social Media Admins).

Remember: when you’re out talking to the public, friends and whānau this daylight saving weekend, remind them to check and install working smoke alarms.

And of course, don’t forget to check yours too.