Risk Communication for Resilient Communities
 
Knowledge Gaps
 
Social Media: Public Alert, Warning, and Feedback
Core Principles #2, 3 & 6
 
Although FEMA leaders have discussed programs that will enhance emergency management agencies' ability to make meaningful use of social media to map incidents, share concerns, identify risks, and communicate to the public, there is still a gap in our emerging understanding of how social media compresses feedback loops, changes audience relations, and affords or constrains risk messages. Further, there need to be focused efforts to integrate social media into the situational awareness of organizations and populations, to handle information saturation,
and to trace how risk messages propagate across social networks.
 
Community Education and Risk Literacy
Core Principle #2 & 5
 
Community education in advance of a disaster (i.e., during the preparedness phase) has already been acknowledged as a significant contributor to community resilience. Early messages from
an authoritative source that treats community members as partners can shape behavioral responses to disaster by orienting an audience's attention, directing them to look at signage, warnings, and other risk messages. Education also has an impact on the risk messages that follow. We have already seen the compelling results of a number of early-intervention risk communication projects - D.A.R.E., "Stop, Drop, and Roll," and a number of others that have led children to look at specific ways to mitigate risk. These types of programs foster a kind of "risk literacy," that is important for a number of reasons. "Literacy" implies the ability to understand, process, make meaningful use of, and share a specific type of information. In the context of written literacy, scholars in education have already established an immense body of research. Based on lessons learned in the classroom and in other social literacy settings, we should begin to develop integrated curricula that introduce people to the terminology, concerns, and operational structures that can help them be better prepared to receive and act on risk messages.
 
Strategic Communication
Core Principles #1 & 4
 
An increasingly important part of military counterinsurgency and other warfighting strategies, strategic communication is defined as, "A systematic series of sustained and coherent activities, conducted across strategic, operational and tactical levels, that enables understanding of target audiences, identifies effective conduits, and develops and promotes ideas and opinions through those conduits to promote and sustain particular types of behaviour" (Tatham 2008). Many of
the principles of strategic communication mirror those of risk communication. Significant effort has been expended in defense circles developing messages that "get in front of" the current state of the battle, shape its outcomes with information, and "prepare" populations before battle (leaflet drops and radio broadcasts often precede and compel word-of-mouth dissemination of messages). though this has proven effective in current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, little research has been conducted into a concept of strategic communication - an overall, comprehensive communication program that shapes attitudes and informs actions - for emergency management.
 
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