Inclusion of the Media in Your Community Fire Safety Coalition

Your department must make it a priority to reach out to all of your local media representatives and include them in the membership of your Community Fire Safety Coalition. Spending time with these individuals away from the incident scene is critical to creating a working relationship that is not based on an emergency or a deadline.

You must make an effort to ensure you are inclusive to the entire media market, and not exclusive to any one particular network, station or printed publication.

Having a cross-segment of your entire media market represented in this community effort will help ensure your department will be well represented to your community and your media is guaranteed to receive a consistent message from your department. If you are fortunate enough to have an extremely large and engaged media market in your community, you have the option to spin the media component off into a sub-committee of your primary coalition; just make sure you continue to have media representation and input in your primary coalition.