Content for the audience of the San Francisco Firefighters

Our company had the exciting opportunity to work with the San Francisco Firefighters Fire Department earlier this year.
It was a funny process of getting the work too.

We were eating lunch at a local bay view restaurant, and had brought our DJI Inspire with us to collect shots of boats at the docks.  While flying the drone, and watching it get attacked by seagulls, a woman approached us and said, “I’m from the fire department.”

Immediately we froze.  The legality of drones is temperamental and you’re never sure who might be upset by their presence.  If someone was going to step up and say something, it would be a civic service like the fire department.

“Oh, hello!” We cooly responded.

“We need aerial shots of the city for our YouTube channel.”

A wave of relief washed over us, discovering that we were safe and in fact, this was a great ice breaker.  After some discussion, I exchanged business cards with her and followed up via email. What an exciting opportunity, we get to take our video production expertise and possibly use it to help our local heroes at the SFFD communicate with the community. We’re not out here saving lives, like the San Francisco Firefighters, but anything we can do to help is an absolutely task we were ready to take on.

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The fire department was facing an interesting problem in its marketing and public outreach.  They had a lot of online support and certainly a great deal of discussion and public awareness, but their limited resources and time prevented them from diving into intense social media. They needed to show people clearly what they do, and why they are a critical part of any metropolitan area. This is where Repertoire comes in.

To kick off what we hope will be a long video campaign for their social channels, we produced a short promotional video that features real San Francisco firefighters working from Station 1 in San Francisco’s SOMA. We were given exclusive access to their brand new Truck Five and even recorded a voice over with their Chief.

Thanks to their already hungry social audience, the video broke 50 thousand views on Facebook alone in only a couple of days and has continued to go viral since.

This is an excellent example of how social media isn’t a platform to find an audience for content, but instead a place to deliver content to your audience. Our video certainly didn’t bring those people to the San Francisco Firefighters, they already had their attention.  Now the doors are wide open to continue creating media and uploading it for their community.

Additionally, with the increased attention to live streaming, the audience a live stream could generate on Facebook now leaves the San Francisco Firefighters & SFFD in a good place. Working with no-profits and organizations in our community is something we love to do, it’s an easy way for us to give back and promote positive change.

We really look forward to the next video project we can work on with them. We’re proud to say we’re supporters of San Franciso Firefighters and the SFFD!