Berkeley, California is a diverse and vibrant city. Home to the University of California, Berkeley, the city has a population of approximately 124,000 residents. Berkeley has varied housing environments. Many residential areas feature lush greenery, reflecting Berkeley's commitment to environmentalism. The city includes both dense urban zones and quieter, residential neighborhoods that border wildland areas. There are specific neighborhoods within Berkeley that directly border wildland areas that would likely be located in the hillsides of the city. These areas experience a higher wildfire risk and require more careful fire prevention measures.
Right of Entry allows the fire department to do a full access evaluation at a homeowner's property to conduct a thorough Defensible Space Inspection, even when the homeowner is not present. This inspection covers the entire outside perimeter of the house, providing a comprehensive set of recommendations for the resident.
Opting into Right of Entry is crucial for residents because it leads to:
The ability to provide a Right of Entry was a top request from the public. The Berkeley Fire Department wanted to create awareness for this new feature starting with a pilot of the Right of Entry module in order to increase the number of full access inspections and get insights on how residents would utilize it before expanding it city wide.
Fire Aside builds campaigns using data collected at both the parcel and resident level in order to communicate with residents based on agency objectives and tailored to the resident’s needs. For Berkeley, we developed a targeted segmentation strategy and unique messaging to improve earlier communication performance and gain insights on how to roll out messaging to all residents.
Within seven days of a single email send, the Berkeley Fire Department got 8% of homes to provide Right of Entry access prior to inspections (if you compare that to other industry benchmarks, only 2-5% of consumers go on to buy a product after receiving an email). Within the first 48 hours Fire Aside had used A/B testing and identified a leading message that resonated with residents and delivered an improvement over prior baseline communications.
Fire Aside's Right of Entry Module allows residents to give permission for fire agencies to access their property when they are not home in order to conduct a full access Defensible Space Inspection, which is when an inspector has a view of the complete perimeter of the house. This provides significantly better community risk visibility compared to a roadside inspection and allows an inspector to make more thorough risk recommendations to residents using Fire Aside's Resident Report.