> >As others chimed in, I think the first step is what are you trying to accomplish with the swag?
>
My thanks to everyone who contributed your thoughts on this topic. It sounds like the safety community is operating primarily on intuition and sales pitches from vendors of promotional items when it comes to this topic.

I do notice the impact of branded items in my life, both on a daily basis and when I go to make a decision. Having seen a logo on a daily basis provides a level of comfort when deciding whether to contact a particular resource. But that requires that the branded item becomes part of one’s daily life. I can also see that specific impacts of a specific give away would be hard to measure.

I agree with Jessica’s suggestion that PPE fit testing as part of the give away process has the potential to impact safety culture. I believe that the UCalifornia system used that approach as part of its follow up to the agreement with the state of California after the Cal OSHA investigation of the Sangji death. I don’t know if they produced any data about how what the impact of that approach, either at the individual level or the institutional safety culture level. Sounds like an interesting opportunity for a doctoral study or two.

I also appreciate Pete raising the larger question of the effectiveness of safety training. With that in mind, I’ll share a resource based on an experience over the weekend:

My son and I went skydiving for the first time on Saturday. In addition to the emotional and physical experiences that I went through, the process was a fascinating experience in safety culture. I’m still incorporating my observations into a story based training about what I learned as a safety professional. But I wanted to bring to the list’s attention to an article I found in the process of following up on the experience. Specifically, I found a reflection on the safety culture of the skydiving community at
https://www.skydivemag.com/new/safety-culture/

It is written by the manager of a skydiving facility and describes the evolution of his approach to safety over the course of his career and his increasing appreciation for the impact of community safety on his personal decision-making. The 2021 article makes a lot of the safety culture concepts we talk about in the lab safety field concrete and his ideas appear to be transferrable to the work we do.

Thanks again to everyone for sharing your thoughts on this topic.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
ralph**At_Symbol_Here**rstuartcih.org

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