We set out to understand what we could do better to raise awareness of the dangers of Carbon Monoxide with young adults and keep our future customers safe and sound and help them understand the dangers associated with Carbon Monoxide.
We set out to understand what we could do better to raise awareness of the dangers of Carbon Monoxide with young adults and keep our future customers safe and sound and help them understand the dangers associated with Carbon Monoxide.
To establish what council members know about carbon monoxide and carbon monoxide poisoning– both the symptoms and dangers and to identify what some of the impactful and creative things are that we can do to deliver important safety messages to teenagers about the dangers of CO.
Understanding
It was clear that council members had a good baseline knowledge of the symptoms of CO poisoning and the types of products that could cause carbon monoxide. However, they were less confident in their knowledge around prevention and detection with only just over half the council members aware of when to test carbon monoxide alarms and where they should be placed.
While this is only a small sample, it identifies the safe use of alarms as an area we need to focus on more in our safety briefing and within campaign messaging. We will also look at triangulating this with the broader research data from our CO and PSR awareness feedback to understand if this is something we should focus on more heavily in campaigns.
Messaging
You said that in order to make messages resonate with young adults they needed to be short, snappy and visible and focus on communicating simple safety messages and symptoms. It was also pointed out that shock tactics stay with you. In particular it was identified that the orange flame messaging and skull and bones imagery as a sign of danger was powerful.
We take these points on board and will make sure that they are fed into future messaging and campaign work we undertake around carbon monoxide.
Partnerships
During conversation about how to share CO messaging, it was clear that you felt that messaging would be more impactful by developing partnerships with key organisations, such as universities, landlords, camping sites and festival organisers as well as bus and train travel operators.
We are already working with Northern Rail on a few projects so will look at opportunities to work together to communicate CO safety messaging. We will also share these insights with our Gas CO safety industry working group to explore how this could fit into a wider partnership programme or trial projects to explore effectiveness of specific partnerships
Social media and technology
The importance of social media channels, such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube as effective channels to share information with young adults was apparent throughout the discussions. However, it was clear that content posted through NGN’s own channels wouldn’t be as effective as more disruptive content, including forced adverts, sponsorship, #’s, augmented reality and filters
The use of augmented reality and innovation to improve CO awareness and detection is something that we are keen to explore further using the new Vulnerability and Carbon Monoxide Allowance for RIIO-2. We will review all the ideas that have come from the group and use these insights to build our new comms campaign. This will then allow us to develop a programme of activity on CO over the next year using our new VCMA allowance.
Engagement techniques
You said you really enjoyed the quiz we ran and felt it was more effective and engaging as a mechanism than just listening to people but would like slightly longer to answer the questions.
We are really keen to ensure council members are kept connected, informed and inspired so will look at using quizzing in future sessions as one of the engaging techniques
Future sessions
There was a high level of support for our continued evolution of our structure online, and you told us they are providing a platform to discuss, learn, engage and find solutions for problems/challenges in relation to our challenges. However, we needed to increase the time spent in breakout rooms with smaller groups, providing more opportunities to share ideas and views. Attendees were also keen to build relationships with each other.
We agree and will tailor our October workshop to build more time into the breakout rooms at the next session and run smaller breakout groups. We are also looking at opportunities to run a more social session to allow council members to further build relationships with each other.