Home Fire Drill Day: Nationwide and Nationwide Children's Hospital, Safe Kids Worldwide and American Red Cross
In 2016, Nationwide’s signature cause program, Make Safe Happen, was in a period of evolution and rebuilding. Following the program’s controversial launch in 2015, the team revamped the tone of messaging from bold and urgent to inspiring and empowering. Strategically and tactically, the program shifted from broad-scale advertising and
awareness to direct action and engagement aimed at preventing accidental injury and death – the #1 cause of death among children ages 0-12.
This pivot included a new goal of empowering 1 Million Safety Actions among parents and caregivers. To reach this lofty goal, the Make Safe Happen team created four Safety Pillars that would be supported by new content, communications and calls-to-action for each quarter of 2016. The fourth and final Safety Pillar was a focus on Fire Safety.
Based on proprietary consumer research, the team learned that just one in five families regularly practice fire drills at home with their families and 45 percent of parents say their children do not know what to do in case of a fire. To address this life-threatening gap, Make Safe Happen created a new, annual safety observance – Home Fire Drill Day – aimed at raising awareness of the importance of the issue and arming families with simple, compelling tools to practice their own home fire drills. To provide a grassroots solution for reaching low-income communities at the greatest risk of home fires, Make Safe Happen partnered with the American Red Cross.
Throughout the year, Make Safe Happen sponsored ARC’s home canvassing campaign, 
which installs working smoke alarms and batteries in homes across the U.S. ARC also leveraged its owned channels and communications to insert the HFDD message and connected Nationwide with families whose lives were being saved. Make Safe Happen also partnered with Safe Kids Worldwide to participate and communicate Home Fire Drill Day and drive significant safety actions through its grassroots coalitions. The team established October 15th as Home Fire Drill Day to create an ownable moment for Nationwide and its partners. This date was selected as it signaled the end of the National Fire Protection Association’s long-standing Fire Prevention Week.
The team worked with Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the National Fire Protection Association to develop the specific steps families should take then turned the insights into content so families could start practicing, finding the info on their computer screens, on their smart phones through the Make Safe Happen app, via social media, or through local safety events. To decrease the fear factor and up the fun factor, the team “gamified” home fire drill practice to make it fun rather than scary.
As a result, the campaign sparked 926,243 safety actions and allowed ARC to install 16,000+ smoke alarms in at-risk neighborhoods. Home Fire Drill Day earned an impressive 187 million impressions and 27 articles in publications including USA Today, Parents.com, Forbes and The Huffington Post; posts from 25 mom bloggers; and a NBC broadcast newsfeed, resulting in more than 200 segments across the U.S.
