 Door knocking can be a really effective way to reach your local community with all kinds of benefits. Through a door knock you can reach people who may never talk to CFA before. These are people who may never come to meetings, never approach CFA and may not think about their risk until it's too late. Brigades in small townships may be able to door knock the whole area whereas for larger brigade areas it may be better to target specific streets or areas based on risk. John Dunn from Violet Town can speak from experience about setting up a successful door knock. His brigade even gave their door knock a creative angle. The Red Bucket Programme. Here at Violet Town we call it the Red Bucket Programme because we have around about 600 people, 250 to 280 homes. Two fire trucks into that number of people doesn't go very well. You won't get a fire truck at your home on a bad day. Here's your fire truck for that day. Think about what's in it, the information for you because you've got to look after yourself on a bad day. Hence the Red Bucket. A reminder for the community to take their own responsibility for their own fire safety. We rolled it out at the beginning of last fire season when awareness was greater. A major side benefit for the brigade was that we gained two new members who have been keen, done their minimum skills and continued on. And that wasn't a primary objective but been a very good secondary outcome for us. In the community to come to us, we found it doesn't work. We had an open day and had one person turn up. We had a barbecue at the local supermarket and we had a few people turn up. Mainly thought we were raising money. It wasn't greatly effective for community engagement, getting the community thinking about fire safety. We found by actually going to the community, going to where they are, meeting them on near turf is much more effective than expecting them to come to us because often they have no interest. You can't sit at your brigade and expect the community to come to you. You have to go out to them, go to where they are, go to their homes and while there the firefighters doing the door knocking can check ease of access to the property and other issues should there be an individual fire or incident at that property. We're there to raise fire awareness, specifically not to raise funds. You end up with a bit of a double meaning or it takes away from your fire awareness. This is going to be your fire truck for the fire season because our two trucks won't be around for years. When door knocking it's very important to consider your own and your brigade members general safety and well-being. If you happen to get to a landholder that's aggressive and doesn't want you on the site, we'll accept that and move on to the next one. If there's an angry dog again, don't go there. It's desirable to go in pairs if you can. Have a start and finish time so people know where you are and when you expect it back when the project's finished.