Gold Quill Spotlight: Helping Farmers Look Up and Live

When the product you provide to customers is essential but dangerous at the same time, you must do all you can to make sure those you serve are as safe as possible.

As the province of Saskatchewan’s primary electricity provider, and a Saskatchewan Crown corporation, SaskPower serves over 550,000 customers. With the health and safety of customers and employees as SaskPower’s top priority, every effort needs to be made to reduce the risk of injury or death around electricity.

Internal statistics measured by SaskPower’s safety department estimate that farm equipment contacting power infrastructure, such as lines and poles, accounts for over 200 incidents a year. Consequences of these incidents range from financial, to reputational and, most importantly, injury and death. Providing the information farmers need to help them make choices to reduce these line contacts is critical.

The 2023 SaskPower farm safety campaign was an opportunity to revitalize the concept of staying safe on the farm while continuing to take advantage of decades of brand equity and familiarity with the company. As the province emerged from Covid-19 restrictions, there was an opportunity to communicate directly with the farming community at events that were relevant to them, while maintaining a presence over other available channels to ensure that the message was shared.

Focus group research helped us at SaskPower understand the barriers and opportunities that exist in changing the safety behaviors of farmers. Most notably, the research revealed that farmers believe they’re the experts of their own farms and, therefore, are open to help but not to being told what to do. They believe they know relevant safety protocols and highly value safety, primarily to protect lives and equipment and minimize downtime. Hitting a line in and of itself is less of a worry. Some farmers even noted that if they hit a line, they don’t report it if there is no injury.

Although they are aware of the risks, farmers acknowledge that other factors such as fatigue, the size of farming equipment, complacency and lack of experience get in the way.

When workers are busy, particularly during seeding and harvest periods, incidents spike. Knowing this, it was not feasible to attempt to set goals around reducing the number of line hits, as there are other factors that influence action. To meet this challenge, SaskPower focused on what we can influence: making sure our information is widely available and accessible to our large audience, enabling them to make safe and informed decisions.

When trying to reach 57,750 customers spread out over a province that is 651,000 square kilometers in size, we knew it was necessary to take advantage of every possible communication channel available to maximize reach. Additional research clearly showed that radio, billboards and social media ads had high levels of recall, so these were the tactics used in this campaign.

The previously mentioned focus groups also revealed that this audience responded best to two types of photography: families on the farm, particularly multi-generational, and photos of the impressive equipment they used every day. All talent was sourced within the province, with local farmers and their families participating in photo shoots for the online and print ads, as well as video.

All tactics drove listeners and or viewers to SaskPower.com/lookupandlive, which reinforced messaging and provided additional information.

The media buy included online ads for Google and YouTube, display ads on agricultural websites, mobile ads on Weather Network and AccuWeather, and Facebook and Instagram newsfeed posts and stories, and instant experience advertising.

Thirty-second spots on 21 Saskatchewan radio stations — the three most popular FM stations and every AM radio station across the province — were also booked for the duration of the campaign. There were seven print ads in popular agricultural publications, and six oversized billboards along commonly traveled highways throughout the province.

There was also a desire to return to the use of experiential marketing, a tactic that had to be shelved during the Covid-19 pandemic. As community events began to return, this provided an ideal opportunity for SaskPower to engage with the farming communities at home, in a familiar setting, and share a conversation about farm safety.

The Safety Ambassador team visited 15 communities that hosted events targeted at the farming community. Some were smaller community fairs and others were large farm shows, like Canada’s Farm Show held annually in Regina, attracting thousands of visitors each year. The ambassadors carried giveaway items that would be useful in a working farm vehicle, such as coffee mugs, water bottles, caps, ice packs, and branded decals and lunch kits, each branded with the steps of what to do if your vehicle contacted a power line.

With the care paid to the audience’s communication needs, SaskPower was thrilled to see great success with the campaign. Goals, objectives and achievements included the following.

Goal: Maintain awareness of SaskPower’s electrical safety messages over the course of the campaign, May through October 2023.

• Objective: Maintain or increase the number of respondents who say they have seen or heard a SaskPower safety message in the last year, from 68% in 2022.
  Achieved: 68% of respondents saw and/or heard a SaskPower safety message.
• Objective: Maintain or increase total media impressions from the 2022 campaign (5,000,000 total impressions).
  Exceeded: The campaign had a total of 9,806,367 impressions.

Goal: Influence those who work around power lines on the farm to work safely over the course of the campaign, May through October 2023.

• Objective: Increase the number of farmers who say that they “take more precautions to keep myself and others safer near power lines because of information I have seen or heard from SaskPower,” from 57% to 60% by December 2023
  Exceeded: A 2023 omnibus survey showed 73% of respondents said they take more precautions, an increase of 13%.
• Objective: Set benchmark for number of farmers who say they know what to do if their equipment contacts a power line, a metric not previously measured.
  Achieved: A 2023 omnibus survey showed benchmark of 73% said farmers knew what to do.

At SaskPower, we’ll keep doing all we can to make sure everyone we serve comes home safe tonight.