Hippo is a marketing and communications company that specialises in delivering positive commercial outcomes by combining strategic thinking, insight, design and technology.

A pioneering social marketing project which fire and rescue services across the North East hope will save lives could be set for a national rollout.

The Cleveland, Durham & Darlington, Northumberland and Tyne & Wear brigades and the Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership wanted to use social marketing to reduce the risk of key target groups being involved in a dwelling fire.

Hippo partnered with specialist insight company Explain, who led focus groups and depth interviews, accompanied by a desk-based analysis of historical fire incident data, to understand how we could reduce the fire risk of individual target groups by addressing gaps in service provision and improving communication/engagement.

The research was instrumental in the development of a social marketing toolkit, designed to match the capacity of the fire and rescue services to deliver a sustained programme
of intervention.

The toolkit enables FRS personnel to conduct targeted home fire safety visits, followed up for 12 months to ensure advice and support provided is acted upon. It also includes a database of potential partner organisations that can be approached by FRSs to develop customer focused, multi-agency interventions where required.

It is believed it will change behaviour, reducing serious injuries and deaths by fire and generating substantial savings to the public purse.

The recently launched project has already featured at a national fire service conference and a number of brigades, as well as police forces and the NHS, have expressed an interest in developing their own toolkits.