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Abstract—Current wildland fi re policy calls for citizen involvement in planning and management. To be effective in their efforts to engage outside stakeholders, resource professionals need to understand citizens ’ understanding and attitudes toward current practices as well as how to best communicate about proposed actions. A variety of outreach methods have been used to communicate the rationale behind fuel reduc-tion techniques. Limited evaluation of these efforts has occurred resulting in a lack of information available to guide the outreach decisions of agency personnel. This paper evaluates the effects of two basic communication strategies—unidirectional information exchange and interactive approaches—on participant understanding and attitudes. Data was collected in two phases; fi rst, citizens completed a survey on-site prior to outreach participation, then, a follow-up questionnaire was mailed to each participant two weeks following initial contact. Resulting data enable assessment of the infl uence of outreach activities on participant understanding and attitudes and evaluation of factors that contributed to program success. Findings suggest interactive outreach methods may be more effective at infl uencing knowledge. However, unidirectional and interactive approaches infl uenced participants with low initial understanding of fi re management or less supportive attitudes toward fuel practices. Results also showed a strong association between knowledge and attitude change suggesting fi re profes-sionals have a real opportunity to help shape public perceptions about appropriate management actions