Amplify Your CRR Efforts in 3 Steps

An effective community risk reduction (CRR) program can be a powerful tool for a fire department looking to improve the overall safety of its community. Whether you are installing fire alarms or educating your elderly population on how to reduce falls, preventing dangerous situations, a CRR program can help reduce calls on those incidents as well as help the department better understand the unique risks present in their community.

However, CRR programs can also take a substantial amount of work to setup, conduct, and maintain. How does a fire department know that its CRR program is making a difference? How can you identify elements that should be tweaked or eliminated? And how can you share these numbers with people who are asking?

The answer is data, and with the right tools, it can be easier than ever to use real-world metrics to evaluate and strengthen your CRR efforts.

Step 1: Track the Right Datapoints

To strengthen CRR efforts, it is critical that fire departments use a software that allows the tracking of CRR activities, as well as the reporting of both activities and incidents. This allows you to set benchmarks and then compare datapoints from before and after the implementation of the CRR program. ESO Incidents and ESO Activities in tandem will allow you to bolster your CRR and call data and reporting so you can better evaluate what’s working and what’s not.

Step 2: Inspections for Prevention

Another way to magnify CRR efforts is to conduct on-site visits for inspections and permitting, helping you identify and uncover possible hazards that could pose as an unsafe situation to the occupants or the surrounding area. A better knowledge of your community can help you prevent dangerous incidents in the future, and can save property and lives. Using a robust software for managing and reporting on Inspections and Permits can be the answer in strengthening and improving CRR efforts.

Step 3: Preparing Your Response

Preplans, preplans, preplans. Always ensure you’re keeping your preplans up-to-date and organized, and review them annually. Preplans will not only ensure your crews are safe and in the know when they arrive on scene, but they also mitigates potential community risks. Preplans that are stored digitally in the Cloud can be shared with responding crews, reviewed onsite by incident command, and offer you the improved odds when forming your response plan.

Taking these three steps can help you form a CRR program that is truly effective and measurable, meaning you have real-world data that allows you to make necessary adjustments as needed to improve. This information can also give you the ability to see which efforts are truly making a difference in the safety of your community, giving you the ability to make better plans for budgets, apply for grants and accreditation, and share your department’s story with the public as needed.

For more information on software tools that help fire departments track, review, and share their operation and performance metrics, take a tour of ESO Fire RMS.

Learn more about starting a Community Outreach Program for Fire and EMS.