Research presented by AAA at the April 2026 CAL FIRE Board of Forestry & Fire Protection meeting puts numbers behind what many agencies already see: when it comes to wildfire mitigation, residents trust their local fire department more than any other source—by a longshot.
Roughly 74% of homeowners say they highly or completely trust their local fire agency for wildfire mitigation information. Utilities come in around 35%. Government and insurers sit near 30%.
That’s not a narrow margin. It’s a different category.
The question isn’t whether fire agencies are trusted. It’s whether that trust is being leveraged to maximize behavior change in the community.
When the same research looked at what actually prompts residents to take mitigation action, fire agencies didn't appear as a named driver at all. The most trusted messenger — by a margin of more than two to one over the next closest source — is largely absent from the list of things that move people to act.
That absence shows up in the numbers. About 75% of homeowners say they're highly aware of wildfire risk. Only 55% say mitigation is a top priority. Just 36% say they're highly concerned. The source residents trust most isn't filling that gap — and the gap is real.
The gap becomes clearer when you look at what drives behavior. The primary motivator isn't a recommendation from an agency — it's personal concern, cited by about 64% of residents who took action. A recommendation from a community organization comes in around 12%. Fire agencies aren't listed as a category at all.
People understand wildfire risk in the abstract. What's harder is seeing it as immediate and personal. That's where urgency fades.
Residents aren’t one audience.
Some are already engaged and looking for expert guidance. Others are motivated but need clear next steps. Many are aware of the risk but haven’t acted. Some remain disengaged.
A single message won’t land the same way across all of them. Most outreach doesn’t account for that. It sends the same message to everyone and relies on the subset of residents who were already inclined to act.
In many programs, communication is limited to system-triggered notifications—important for prompting residents to access their reports, but on their own not designed to sustain engagement or drive behavior over time.
Most programs already have signals showing who is engaging and who isn’t. They just aren’t using them to shape what happens next.
This isn’t theoretical.
In this context, a “campaign” refers to a coordinated set of resident communications—typically a mix of email, direct mail, and follow-up outreach—timed around inspections and adjusted based on whether residents engage.
Across inspection-based programs, a consistent pattern shows up: residents who engage are far more likely to act. Those who don’t engage rarely do without follow-up.
Same program. Same population. Same inspectors. The difference was what happened after the inspection.
|
Standard notifications |
Targeted outreach |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Post-inspection follow-up |
One-time |
Behavior-driven sequence |
|
Violation resolution rate |
9% |
44% |
Nothing else changed.
At Truckee Fire Protection District, a focused campaign built around report engagement, full-access inspections, and grant participation, full-access inspections, and grant participation led to a tripling of full-access inspection demand in the first season. Grant applications increased fourfold. Unique property resolutions rose from 779 the prior year to 2,382.
Each additional time a resident opens and reviews their inspection report increases the likelihood they take action.
Both programs work, in part, because the communication comes from the fire agency. Residents receive it as a message from the source they trust most.
That trust didn’t come from a campaign.
It comes from decades of showing up—on incidents, during evacuations, in inspections and community meetings, through prevention work, and in relationships built at the neighborhood level.
Residents have extended fire agencies a level of credibility no insurer, utility, or external program can replicate.
That credibility is an asset. It can also be worn down.
Generic outreach does that slowly. Messages that don’t reflect a resident’s actual property. Communications that show up only when the agency needs something. Outreach that treats every household the same.
None of this breaks trust outright. But it doesn’t build it—and it doesn’t move people to act.
When communication is specific, timely, and tied to what’s actually happening at a property, it compounds. Each relevant touchpoint makes the next one more likely to land.
Closing the gap doesn’t require more messaging. It requires more relevant messaging. The right message at the right time is useful. At the wrong time, it’s spam or clutter.
Communication that reflects the resident’s actual property, adapts based on the work they’ve done, and shows up when decisions are being made.
In practice, that looks less like a one-time notification and more like a sequence:
This is where many agencies are starting to shift—from one-time notifications to ongoing, behavior-driven campaigns built around the inspection lifecycle.
The assessment becomes the starting point of an ongoing interaction—not the end of one. The report is the first touchpoint. What follows is what determines whether anything changes.
The takeaway isn’t just that fire agencies are trusted.
It’s that trust creates an opening—one most programs are only partially using.
Assessment programs already generate the data needed for better communication. Because inspections, reports, and resident engagement live in the same system, agencies can see who has opened their report, who hasn’t, and who has taken action—and use that to guide what happens next.
Agencies putting this into practice are seeing it in their numbers and in their communities. Residents respond differently when communication reflects their property and shows up while a decision is still in front of them.
For many agencies, that shift requires more than tools. It requires a way to design, sequence, and adapt communication over time based on what residents actually do.
Most programs use that trust once—at inspection. After that, communication stops.
The opportunity is to use it continuously—and to reach the residents who aren’t going to act on their own.
The homeowner research referenced in this post was conducted by CSAA Insurance Group and presented publicly at the April 23, 2026 CAL FIRE Board of Forestry and Fire Protection Zone Zero Regulatory Advisory Committee Meeting.