Nextdoor Public Agencies & Services Resource Hub
Sign in or Join the community to continue

Recording: Warning Research and the Nextdoor Comms Prompt, with Dr. Jeannette

Posted Sep 17, 2026 | Views 6
Share

Speakers

user's Avatar
Joseph Porcelli
Global Public Agency & Disaster Preparedness & Response Lead @ Nextdoor

Joseph joined Nextdoor in May 2014 and serves as Global Public Agency & Disaster Preparedness & Response Lead. In his role, Joseph manages local, state, and federal relationships and Crisis Response in the US and Canada. He also serves as an internal partner to global public agency teams and country managers.

Before joining Nextdoor, Joseph established the Community Engagement consulting practice at GovDelivery (now Granicus) and created and managed National Preparedness Community (Community.FEMA.gov) on behalf of FEMA. Joseph also served as the nation's first Community Engagement Strategist for the Department of Homeland Security and worked for the Boston Police Department.

You can connect with Joseph on Twitter at @JosephPorcelli and Nextdoor at @Nextdoor.

Joseph received a BA in Marketing and Business Management at Saint Michael's College and a Nonprofit Management and Leadership certificate at the Questrom School of Business and com and participated in Havard's National Preparedness Leadership Initiative and serves as a global ambassador for the initiative.

+ Read More
user's Avatar
Jeannette Sutton
Founder and Editor in Chief & Associate Professor @ The Warn Room

Jeannette Sutton, PhD, is an internationally recognized scholar of alerts and warnings, identified by Stanford University as being among the top 2% of scientists worldwide in 2024 and 2025.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Geological Survey, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, she has studied, taught, and written about risk communication, alerts, and warnings for more than two decades.

Her signature project, sponsored by the Integrated Public Alerts and Warnings System (IPAWS) program at FEMA, led to the design, development, and deployment of the Message Design Dashboard (MDD), a software used by emergency managers and other public safety communicators to craft effective messages.

The data backbone and analog to the MDD, The Warning Lexicon, is used internationally for message development across a full range of hazards. A twin document, the Post Alert Lexicon, provides the structure and contents for “all clear” messages issued post-event. Additional studies on AMBER alert messaging have resulted in recommendations for effective missing persons messages.

She works at the University at Albany as an Associate Professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity; serves as an Advisor to EM1; is co-host on The Alerting Authority; and is the founder and owner of The Warn Room.

+ Read More

CONTENT & TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Jeannette Sutton and her colleagues reviewed a decade of wireless emergency alerts. Most were missing something. When they looked specifically at missing person alerts, nearly all were incomplete, most often leaving out who is missing, where to look, or what to do.
When a warning is missing a piece of information, people go looking for the piece instead of acting. Researchers call that milling, and those minutes come out of the time someone had to protect themselves.
Warning messages fail in patterns, and once you can see the pattern, you can stop repeating it.
Dr. Sutton joined Joseph Porcelli of Nextdoor's Public Agency Team to walk through the five message components her research identifies and how Nextdoor built them into the free Nextdoor Behavioral Comms and Alerting Prompt.
What we covered:
  • The five message contents, and what the research shows happens when one goes missing
  • Why a complete warning outperforms a short one, even on channels built around character limits
  • Which situations owe an all-clear, and what skipping it costs you
Links:
+ Read More
Comments (0)
Popular
avatar