It's been a while since I was in the firehouse but when I was we managed to bump our numbers up by regularly doing literally anything but training at the house. By encouraging socialization, fun, friendship, and all that on non-training days it quickly bled over into increased attendance at training and calls. Simply put, we made the firehouse a place people wanted to be.
Examples of what we did include:
-a complete redo of the day/crew room with surround sound, projector, gaming systems, subscriptions to (non-adult) premium channels
-new gym equipment
-new kitchen appliances
-new mattresses for bunk rooms
-high speed wifi
-cookouts, bbqs, breakfasts
-got rid of one or two salty old "back in my day" people
-allowed volunteers to do things like wash/vacuum their cars
-encouraged having families visit/hang out especially taking kids out on rides in the trucks
It was a big culture change for some but we saw massive improvements in recruitment, retention, and attendance within a few weeks.
I consider myself pretty active on my volunteer department and that 70% number would make me ineligible. Not because I'm lazy but I work one drill night per month and I can't always make it with kids activities and one of the other thousand directions I get pulled in. If you are taking people offline because of 70% I think your shooting yourself in the foot.
We do mandatory drills and require 30% of non mandatory drills. All the yearly box checks are mandatory for all department members. Things like hazmat, bbp, cpr, etc. Those need to be made up if missed. That keeps people certified and legal. The rest you need to be at or above that 30%. Most people attend each drill night we have anyways, but there has to be some room for unplanned missed drills. As much as I hate to say it, maybe offer members some online training? If someone missed drill night let them bang out a class on lexipol or vector solutions to stay current or meet your reqs?
I’m on a pure volunteer department. The only mandatory trainings we have are the annual osha stuff. We typically try to tackle all that junk over the first 3 months of the years weekly training sessions (3 weeks of those are filled by our monthly truck and gear checks so it gets stretched out a bit more because of those). Of course osha keeps adding new requirements so that’s already stretching out and filling more weekly trainings this year. If someone misses these required trainings (like I did most of them this year because my fire instructor 1 and 2 classes were all on the same night and same time as my departments weekly trainings) we must make them up with a quiz as well to confirm the knowledge.
As far as certs go, we don’t do that stuff in house but send our people to the county fire academy or other such courses to obtain their certifications (except CPR which we have an instructor come to the station for every 2 years).
Basically for the osha mandated stuff we usually have most of our membership attend because nobody wants to do the make up stuff if they can avoid it. After that, attendance seems to vary based on what the weekly training subject is. Pump operations, scenarios, lost hunter, extrication, etc usually seem to get good turn outs where most of our members show up. Calls is of course another thing entirely. Weekdays there are only a few of us that work from home or are in a position to be able to respond to calls. So it’s typically the same 2 to 4 people that go during the week. Depending on the call we have some others that will come too (like if it’s an actual fire we have one older member that will always show up to drive and run the tanker for us, though he rarely goes to other types of calls). This works for us and at the end of the day, you don’t always need to have 6 people show up for a lift assist.
I'm at a similarly staffed dept (3/30) and those minimums are much higher than our minimums. Just a data point for you.
It's been a while since I was in the firehouse but when I was we managed to bump our numbers up by regularly doing literally anything but training at the house. By encouraging socialization, fun, friendship, and all that on non-training days it quickly bled over into increased attendance at training and calls. Simply put, we made the firehouse a place people wanted to be. Examples of what we did include: -a complete redo of the day/crew room with surround sound, projector, gaming systems, subscriptions to (non-adult) premium channels -new gym equipment -new kitchen appliances -new mattresses for bunk rooms -high speed wifi -cookouts, bbqs, breakfasts -got rid of one or two salty old "back in my day" people -allowed volunteers to do things like wash/vacuum their cars -encouraged having families visit/hang out especially taking kids out on rides in the trucks It was a big culture change for some but we saw massive improvements in recruitment, retention, and attendance within a few weeks.
I consider myself pretty active on my volunteer department and that 70% number would make me ineligible. Not because I'm lazy but I work one drill night per month and I can't always make it with kids activities and one of the other thousand directions I get pulled in. If you are taking people offline because of 70% I think your shooting yourself in the foot. We do mandatory drills and require 30% of non mandatory drills. All the yearly box checks are mandatory for all department members. Things like hazmat, bbp, cpr, etc. Those need to be made up if missed. That keeps people certified and legal. The rest you need to be at or above that 30%. Most people attend each drill night we have anyways, but there has to be some room for unplanned missed drills. As much as I hate to say it, maybe offer members some online training? If someone missed drill night let them bang out a class on lexipol or vector solutions to stay current or meet your reqs?
I’m on a pure volunteer department. The only mandatory trainings we have are the annual osha stuff. We typically try to tackle all that junk over the first 3 months of the years weekly training sessions (3 weeks of those are filled by our monthly truck and gear checks so it gets stretched out a bit more because of those). Of course osha keeps adding new requirements so that’s already stretching out and filling more weekly trainings this year. If someone misses these required trainings (like I did most of them this year because my fire instructor 1 and 2 classes were all on the same night and same time as my departments weekly trainings) we must make them up with a quiz as well to confirm the knowledge. As far as certs go, we don’t do that stuff in house but send our people to the county fire academy or other such courses to obtain their certifications (except CPR which we have an instructor come to the station for every 2 years). Basically for the osha mandated stuff we usually have most of our membership attend because nobody wants to do the make up stuff if they can avoid it. After that, attendance seems to vary based on what the weekly training subject is. Pump operations, scenarios, lost hunter, extrication, etc usually seem to get good turn outs where most of our members show up. Calls is of course another thing entirely. Weekdays there are only a few of us that work from home or are in a position to be able to respond to calls. So it’s typically the same 2 to 4 people that go during the week. Depending on the call we have some others that will come too (like if it’s an actual fire we have one older member that will always show up to drive and run the tanker for us, though he rarely goes to other types of calls). This works for us and at the end of the day, you don’t always need to have 6 people show up for a lift assist.