In conversation with

When Electrical Safety First launched its groundbreaking (and CorpComms Awards winning) Battery Breakdown report in July 2023, it was the first time that many people became aware of the potential dangers of lithium-ion batteries, which power e-bikes and e-scooters.

The 60-page report exposed the risks of poor quality batteries, conversion kits and chargers, often bought from online marketplaces, that could cause house fires. But not just any old fire.

‘It’s a ferocious fire. It’s not like your toaster going on fire. It’s a thermal runway,’ explains Electrical Safety First’s director of communications Rory Carroll. ‘It creates its own oxygen and the smoke is highly toxic. It’s like a flame thrower.’

Indeed, one lithium-ion battery has as much explosive power as six hand grenades.

Burning at temperatures as high as 700 degrees Celsius, these fires are also almost impossible to put out. The London Fire Brigade now describes lithium-ion battery fires as the fastest emerging and growing fire risk in the capital. There is now at least one fire a day in the UK caused by these batteries, and there have been multiple deaths.

The report also carried 30 recommendations to tackle the issue, which included strengthening regulations of online marketplaces.

When it launched, Carroll’s view was that it was ‘quite a dry report’ and that 100 to 200 downloads would be a good result. In the end, Battery Breakdown was downloaded more than 5,000 times, while his own LinkedIn post about the report generated more than 66,000 impressions and started a debate between engineers across the world.

He explains: ‘We did the report to really crystallise our thinking, to distil our own understanding of the subject, but it gave us something substantial to campaign with, rather than just doing a campaign. It has ended up being highly influential.’

It led to the introduction of the Product Safety and Metrology Bill in the King’s Speech in 2024. Enacted a year later, the bill added measures to stop unsafe batteries from being sold online and force online marketplaces to take responsibility for the products they host – for which Battery Breakdown has been credited.

‘The Act is hopefully the vehicle that can tackle a lot of these issues that we've been dealing with,’ says Carroll. ‘It’s a critical issue because of the severity when it does go wrong. It’s been an extremely important campaign for us. And in a relatively short space of time, we've seen significant progress, actual tangible outcomes, rather than just simply the big coverage.

‘For example, Wish, the online marketplace, has stopped selling things like e-bike chargers while eBay has stopped selling second-hand e-bike batteries. And multiple different transport networks have banned e-bikes or e-scooters, although I don’t know which ones came before or after our campaign.’

To date, the campaign has been backed by more than organisations, ranging from Brompton, the pioneer of fold-up bikes, to Which? and the National Fire Chiefs Council.

But there is one caveat Carroll wishes to emphasise. ‘We've been very clear and very vocal in our campaign that we're not saying e-bikes themselves are dangerous. Lots of us at Electrical Safety First use e-bikes.  It's just about making sure the ones that get into the UK market have been through the proper safety checks and have not got risk of going off whilst you're asleep, oblivious, upstairs.’

It had been Carroll’s dream to launch a major national awareness campaign when he arrived at Electrical Safety First in 2022 to head up its communications function. But first he had to sort out the basics in order for the charity, which had rebranded just eight years before, to become a household name.

He explains: ‘Most people don’t even think about Electrical Safety First. But we are the biggest resource of free electrical safety advice. Ultimately making the charity a household name is not because we want to become famous but because we want to make electrical safety a thing you think about.

‘If you’ve got a personal quandary, a lot of people would turn to Citizen’s Advice. Or if they were buying a toaster, Which? We’d like to be thought of in that sort of way. That’s our objective.’

Following several departures, the team Carroll inherited was small, imbalanced and lacking key skills in social media, which is critical for a campaigning charity. There was no media database system, so people were Googling journalists’ details, no wire service, no central image library and no evaluation.

Carroll started to fill in the gaps, rebalance the structure and acquire some services. ‘The previous structure was very generalist. We added digital experts, in-house content creators and film editors,’ he recalls.

‘The proactive traditional media function was very good, but under-resourced, so we added an extra PR role, and we expanded the role of events manager to include project manager. And then we added another division, around brand management and email marketing, which didn’t exist before.’

He then turned his attention to the branding. ‘There was no consistency which is not going to work in terms of making the charity a household name and recognisable,’ explains Carroll. It was also dull, used ambiguous imagery and had the strapline The UK’s Electrical Safety Expert.

‘It’s repetitive and not a great use of real estate. We looked at other organisations, like Money Saving Expert, which has Cutting your costs, Fighting your corner. It is much more personalised and punchy,’ he explains. This inspired Electrical Safety First’s new positioning statement Powering Change + Saving lives.

‘Our charity needs to be projected as being absolutely up to the second technically, because we need to be right across any threats of new technical developments that will be in people’s houses and the like.’

The old pencil sketch style imagery used by the charity did not fit the brief, and actually caused confusion as people tried to decipher what each image stood for, while the colour palette was bland.

‘The illustrations were a bit basic and, when combined with the old colour palette, were nice and simple but not modern enough,’ he adds. ‘We replaced them with modern iconography, which has been brilliant for building into our brand application, and which we can animate or even make glow.’

The impact has been noticeable. Two years ago, Electrical Safety First recorded a 5.65 percentage point increase in brand recognition compared with a year earlier to 26.5 per cent. Or to put it another way, within three years of Carroll’s arrival, his team’s work means that more than a quarter of the UK population have now heard of, and recognise, the charity.

The rebrand has since been followed by a new website. ‘Candidly, the old one did not work very well. We in the charity often used Google to find things on our own website. It needed a total rebuild.’

The new website, which is the world’s biggest resource of free electrical safety advice, is clear about the charity’s mission to prevent deaths and injuries caused by electricity through improving people’s awareness of risks, and influencing both government policy and industry standards. It carries details of the charity’s research, campaigns and a handy section to help users find registered electricians in their area.

Every year, Electrical Safety First conducts a nationwide consumer survey of 10,500 people. ‘We are very evidence-driven, looking at the fire and rescue data to help pinpoint what campaigns to focus on,’ he explains. ‘Our annual survey is big enough to slice regionally and demographically to track our progress in terms of consumers’ behaviour,’ explains Carroll.

Last year, the charity launched a campaign around conversion kits that convert push bikes into electric bikes. ‘You get well-made ones which are safe, but then there are ones which are either not safe because they are bought from a third-party seller online marketplace, or have been installed by someone that has not the right skills,’ explains Carroll. ‘Our survey found that something like one in five people that owned a bike were considering converting it into an e-bike, so that informed our campaign around conversion kits.’

But he also credits the ‘natural hunger’ of his team, and the charity, for keeping its campaigning fresh and relevant. ‘We’re a good sized organisation. There’s about 30 of us, with our comms team, our technical team and our public affairs team. But there’s no siloing, really. We’re almost extensions of each other, if you like, so that feeds in,’ says Carroll. ‘Tech will find a great potential campaign or we will, and we’ll go to them or vice versa, or public affairs will identify a potential opportunity for legislative change to tackle something. There’s a fizz of ideas which naturally keeps things fresh.’

But he is also the first to admit that electricity and electrical safety can be a dry and technical subject which can be quite challenging. ‘And it’s invisible. Unless something sets on fire in your house, you don’t notice it. A big campaign for us is ‘electrical installation condition reports’, which is hardly the sexiest of subjects. We have to keep it simple and real, so we describe it as an MOT for your house,’ he says.

‘You wouldn’t go and drive around in your car without any clue as to what is under your bonnet. But, as we’re talking now, there’s electricity coursing through the laptop you’re looking at, the walls, the ceilings, floor and multiple devices. That is the reality. Electricity is all around you, and you need to make sure that you’re using it safely.’

But the paradox of such a dry subject is the emotional impact it can inflict. ‘We deal with life or death situations. In reality, when you’re immersed in it, the thing that really brings home [the importance of our work] are the case studies.’

While Electrical Safety First still approaches people to tell their stories, it has found in recent years, with its enhanced profile, that more people are directly approaching the charity to tell the story of how they lost their loved ones or their homes, or the impact of their life changing injuries.

‘It’s a big driver for the team because we know that the difference we can make may mean one less incident like the stories we hear,’ Carroll shares. ‘And we have a massive duty of care to those people. Our media leads are in regular contact, both in terms of their wellbeing, but also to keep them updated as to our progress – to let them know that they are making a difference.

‘We have had some say, and I want to get this phrasing right, that working with us gives them a reason to carry on. It gives them a purpose and a chance to save other people’s lives, if you like, by telling their story.’ 

For Carroll, a stronger brand, a rebuilt team and a sharper campaigning voice were never the end goal in themselves – they were the means of getting a genuinely dangerous, often invisible risk taken seriously, by the public and by government alike. The Product Safety and Metrology Act is the clearest proof that it worked: a piece of legislation that traces back to a 60-page report nobody expected would become a bestseller (of sorts).

What comes next, Carroll suggests, is more of the same discipline: following the data, picking the fights worth having, and never losing sight of the people behind the statistics. ‘There's no downtime; we campaign throughout the year,' he says.