Getting to know Noosa residents’ bushfire knowledge

Rachael Vorwerk

Alongside Noosa Council and Queensland tech-hub Firetech Connect, the team at FireThrive created an online quiz and profile tool to help Noosa residents better prepare for the bushfire season.

Challenge statement

In a local government area of 54,000 people, it’s difficult to create bushfire education resources when you’re unsure how the community perceives bushfire threat.

How might we better understand how prepared Noosa residents are for the bushfire season to inform future education campaigns?

What the client wanted

Noosa Council were looking for information about their residents’:

perceptions of bushfires

Prior knowledge/skill

most trusted communication sources in an emergency

intended evacuation behaviour for future planning

vulnerabilities in a bushfire

Impact

Out of 64 users, the FireThrive team reported a breakdown of Noosa residents to be majority Community Guided, followed by Responsibility Denier, then Considered Evacuator.

While respondents’ details were anonymised, the FireThrive team could see the breakdown of postcodes of each participant.

This helps Noosa Council to better tailor their bushfire preparedness education resources to subsets of the community, to take a more granular behaviour change approach in the future.

Contact us today

If you are looking for more information about your community’s bushfire preparedness, please get in touch at hello@climatethrive.com.au.

The nitty gritty details

Step 1: Gathering the data

The team worked closely with social science researcher Dr Ken Strahan to translate his research into a usable tool for bushfire-prone residents called How prepared are you for a bushfire? (learn more about that project here).

Through workshops, we worked through Ken’s seven bushfire evacuee archetypes and identified each groups’ most immediate point of improvement

Step 2: Rolling out the tool to Noosa residents

Working with the Noosa Council communications team, the FireThrive team created social media tiles that could easily be shared

Step 3: Running a competition for Noosa residents

To encourage Noosa residents to complete the quiz, we ran a competition so residents could go in the running for a bushfire kit backpack valued at $450, which included a battery powered radio, an emergency foil blanket, first aid kit and much more.