Chimney Fire Safety Week takes place in the first week of September each year, the ‘official’ start of the cold season when many of the public are anticipated to start relighting their fires as the colder weather draws in. With over 1.5 million Brits estimated to own a stove, the campaign is an important consumer awareness initiative putting the spotlight on the risks associated to poor maintenance, especially after a prolonged period of non-use.
Having run for over a decade the campaign is well established, however, up to now press attention has been limited, relying mainly on commercial opportunities and partnerships. As one of their flagship campaigns, our client tasked us with raising its profile in the consumer and trade media and utilising the reach of the press to help spread their message further and wider than ever before. In true HeadOn PR fashion, we set to work.
What we did…
Here at HeadOn PR we understand the power of research and the appetite the press has for data. In cases like this we’d normally reach out to one of our trusted research partners, this time however we didn’t have to. Instead, we leveraged our client’s vast database of 120,000 consumers, retailers and tradespeople. So, we had the audience, now we needed the data for a campaign that would appeal to the press.
With Chimney Fire Safety Week focussed on raising awareness of the importance of maintenance, we wanted to see how many people were following this advice. As such, we devised a questionnaire that would help pull this data together.
The good news was most people were following the advice of having their chimney swept, however the findings did uncover some great data that we knew would make headlines. The questionnaire revealed 1 in 10 owners of wood burners and other solid fuel stoves leave it years before sweeping their chimneys and a shocking 41% of people that own wood burners or other solid fuel stoves have never had their appliance serviced. Some owners even went as far as to say they didn’t believe that their stove needed servicing, while others were taking the DIY route.
With our headline secured we carefully crafted an announcement and put out findings to the press.
