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 joins 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. We'll write an Alert live, then take it apart against the five so you can run the same check on your own drafts. You leave with the checklist.
What we'll cover:
→ 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
→ How to use the Prompt: https://nextdoor.com/commsprompt
→ Live critique of Alerts attendees bring
Who should attend: emergency managers, PIOs, alerting coordinators, law enforcement and fire communicators, public health communicators, and anyone who writes the Alerts that go out.
Attendees
