Annual fire safety campaign informs and prepares all Victorians, including CALD communities

Since 2017, Convenience Advertising has worked with the Victorian Government Department of Justice and Community Safety (DJCS) to deliver the annual Victorian Fire Season Campaign (VFSC).

The annual VFSC seeks to increase community awareness of the risks associated with bush and grassfires, highlighting the importance of fire preparedness. Convenience Advertising was used to help raise awareness with Victoria’s culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.

With 27.6% of Victorians speaking a language other than English at home, Victoria is one of the most culturally diverse societies in the world and is among the fastest growing states in Australia.

The annual Victorian Fire Season Campaign aims to ensure fire safety and preparedness messages reach all Victorians, including those who speak languages other than English.

Audience-based messaging & geotargeting
Placing grass and bushfire safety messages in the bathrooms of specific venues based on local language prevalence and proximity to fire-risk areas allows the DJCS to reach English and CALD target audiences directly, thereby maximising message relevance for each audience. 

Maximum recall
The private, undistracted bathroom setting with 2 minutes of audience dwell time (and 70% minimum recall rate) is not only conducive to behaviour change, but allows the audience an opportunity to engage with a message in a measurable way through tools such as QR codes. 

• Venues: Shopping centres
• Locations: Victoria

The ongoing partnership between Convenience Advertising and the DJCS has educated millions of Victorians about fire safety, and the continuing success of the campaign is a key example of the effectiveness of bathroom advertising. 

For the most recently completed 2023-24 campaign, Convenience Advertising developed a multi-faceted and targeted approach, designed to engage with a range of CALD communities, across regional and metropolitan Victoria.

The campaign used unique QR Codes to compare engagement across CALD communities, providing key insights into the effectiveness of the messaging and engagement within each language group.

2023-24 campaign results:

The priority languages for the DJCS 2023-24 campaign were English, Greek, Vietnamese, Dari, Hindi, Punjabi, Karen, Farsi, Mandarin, Filipino, Italian, Arabic, Turkish and Cantonese.

The campaign was geotargeted by increased risk of grass or bushfire. The CALD messaging was further geo-targeted by suburb, focusing on the two most commonly spoken languages other than English.

Using QR codes, the campaign compared engagement across CALD communities, providing key insights into the effectiveness of the messaging and engagement within each language group.

Other campaigns during our partnership

The "How well do you know fire?" campaign reinforced the deadly risks of fire and the importance of planning and preparing for the fire season, including spreading critical knowledge that fire can travel at 25 kms per hour, which no one can outrun.

The 2016-17 campaign prompts all Victorians to be better prepared for extreme weather conditions across summer including bush and grassfires, extreme heat and smoke health.

*Weekly impressions (bathroom visits) based on 1,334,849 reported weekly traffic by participating shopping centre landlords, in conjunction with independent evaluation on bathroom visits (Convenience Advertising (2024) DonateLife: Year 2 Narrowcast Messaging by Dr Shaun Ratcliff and Accent Research - available for download). Program ran during the December 2023 - February 2024 period.