Reading Summary 11 - Risk and Crisis Communication - Jeff Neal

Reading Summary 11:  Risk and Crisis Communication

Jeff Neal

Reference: Ferrante, Pamela; Risk & Crisis Communication, Essential Skills for today's SH&E professional; Public Safety, Print Journal Held; Jun2010, Vol. 55 Issue 6, p38-45. 8p

Theme: Risk and Crisis communication involve methods of how to communicate to the public and stakeholders information related to an emergency event.

Summary: The difference between risk and crisis communication is that risk communication occurs prior to an emergency event.  It is the ongoing process that helps to define a problem and notify stakeholder of the need for action and outline their involvement.  Crisis communication includes the messages that are delivered to stakeholders that are threated during the actual emergency.  Crisis communication purpose is to deliver the information to the public to prevent, avoid, or recover from an emergency.

When delivering the messages to the public it's important to understand how this information is processed by the public.  There are four theoretical models that outline how information is processed;

Risk perception Model: This model theorizes that public perception related to risk comes from 15 different factors.  The effect of each factor depends on the stakeholder involve, but understanding these factor help with understanding how people react to risk and crisis.  These 15 factors include: Volunteerism, controllability, familiarity, equity, benefits, understanding, certainty, dread, trust in institutions, reversibility, personal stake, and ethical / moral nature, human vs. natural origin, victim identity, and catastrophic potential.

Mental Notice Model: This model determines how the pubic process information under stress and anxiety. As the level of stress raises the individual's ability to process information decreases.  If emergency personnel are trying to deliver information during a disaster much of the message will be lost due to the public's inability to process the information.

Negative Dominance Model: During an event negative information will be received at a much high rate than positive information.  People are more concerned with what they will lose then any possible gains. 

Trust Determination Model:  The public must have trust, and trust comes first in all messages.  Without trust much of the message will be lost.  Trust in not obtained quickly, for this reason emergency personnel must establish trust prior to the event.  If the public trust the communicator the message will be heard.

Application to the lesson: Many time emergency managers spend much of their time preparing the message that will be delivered, but spend little time preparing the public to receive the message.  Hey believe because the message is so important and well prepared that everyone will listen to it when they speak, like an EF Hutton commercial.  It takes time to build the trust and evaluate the stakeholder's needs in our communities so that the message will be receive.   

Application to emergency services: part of the emergency response plan for a major disaster if communications are down in Salt Lake city is to have fire personnel report to specific stations following a disaster and then systematically drive though the area looking for emergencies.  Much of the public is not aware of this.  They believe they can still call 911 in the event of an earthquake and that help will be on its way.  This message needs to be delivered prior to an event so that the public will be prepared to wait for assistance from emergency service personnel.