Communication skills light up Fire Safety Fest

By partnering with GF firefighters, UND’s COMM 430 class gained real-world advertising, PR and event-planning experience

Don’t put a pizza in the oven at 1 in the morning, and then fall asleep.

That’s not the kind of tip that gets offered at most college-freshmen orientation sessions, said Gary Lorenz, chief of the Grand Forks Fire Department. But it ought to be, because many college students haven’t had a class on fire safety since elementary school.

And college life carries with it a few special risks that are worth calling attention to, he said.

Lorenz spoke to UND Today at Fire Safety Fest, an April 5 event created through a unique partnership between the Grand Forks Fire Department and the UND Communication Department’s COMM 430 advertising and public-relations campaigns class.

Thanks to the partnership, UND students got real-world experience building a strategic communication campaign – including original graphics, posters and other materials – and producing a professional-quality event. Meanwhile, the Fire Department got to promote both fire safety and firefighting careers to a vital demographic: college students, said UND Associate Professor Joonghwa Lee.

“In this class, our students see how they can use all of the skills and knowledge they’ve learned in their UND Communication classes to contribute to society,” Lee said. “In this case, the Fire Safety Fest that the students planned will help all UND students better understand not only fire safety, but also the possibility that they could become professional firefighters.”

“So this is where our students are taking their classroom skills and applying them to the real world.”

Fire safety, plus firefighting careers

Fire Safety Fest took place in a ballroom of the UND Memorial Union. It featured interactive exhibits in which Grand Forks firefighters showed how fire extinguishers work, how thermal imagers detect and image heat from objects, how heavy charged firehoses are and how firefighters use those hoses to extinguish flames.

At another station, students competed to put on firefighters’ rigs as fast as possible. A hazmat station gave information on identifying chemicals. And throughout the event, students could ask firefighters about jobs in the field, making the event double as a unique UND career fair.

“I love the people who come to firefighting with four-year degrees,” Lorenz said. “I can tie almost any undergraduate major into our business, whether it’s in a health field, the environment, all of those lines of work.

“Now the truth is, do you need a four-year degree at the level of a newly hired firefighter? Probably not. But as you advance in your career, it becomes more and more important, because those promotions call upon all kinds of management, organizational, computer and other skills.”

Regarding fire safety, Lorenz stressed again the gap in fire-safety awareness that can develop between grade-school field trips to the fire station, and college.

“Take cooking,” he said. “College students often enter their freshman year straight from high school, and have never cooked for themselves before. But suddenly they’re living in an apartment and cooking for themselves.”

They should know that cooking and smoking are the two leading causes of fires, he said. Likewise, a fire-safety refresher such as the Fire Safety Fest can remind them not to throw water on a grease fire, not to overload power strips, and to use candles – if candles are allowed in the building at all, which very often they are not – with extreme care.

“The Fire Department is most successful when we can prevent every emergency from happening,” Lorenz said.

Real-world strategic communication, event planning and results

For UND senior Macy Marquette, the Fire Safety Fest was an internship-like capstone to her Communication and English majors.

That’s because the event was not a single-day challenge, but instead was part of a semester-long, professional-quality Advertising/PR campaign.

“For example, I’m the media strategy director,” she said. “So, I was in charge of picking what types of media we’d use to market for the event. Would we use traditional or nontraditional media? Posters or social media? That kind of thing.”

Marquette and others in Lee’s Communication 430: Advertising and Public Relations Campaigns class also surveyed students to gauge knowledge of fire safety, and organized focus groups to figure out how best to promote the Fire Safety Fest event.

“From the focus group, we learned that students wanted something that would be engaging and fun,” Marquette said. “That’s why we have all of these interactive displays, and the competition to get the gear on, and so on.

“And, of course, we have the free food,” she said with a laugh. Deek’s Pizza had very generously provided gift cards to be awarded as prizes, as well as multiple boxes of pizza for the event’s attendees, Marquette, Lee and Lorenz all pointed out.

“I can’t say enough about Deek’s Pizza,” Lorenz added. “They really stepped up for this event, and provided an incredible amount of pizza and support. They’ve been wonderful to work with and deserve a really big thank-you.”

Nor would Communication 430’s work be done at the event’s close, Marquette said. Students would go on to compile lessons learned, get feedback from the Fire Department on their project’s success, and exit the class with a Campaign Book that would document their semester-long advertising and public-relations effort.

“And that’s something I’ll be able to bring to a job interview,” she said. “I graduate this semester, so I’m really grateful for this whole experience, for sure. It’s been super valuable.”