Using Social Marketing for Public Emergency Preparedness

Social Change for Community Resilience

Nancy Meyer-Emerick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317420491
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Less than half of the public in the U.S. have taken the three steps to prepare for emergencies that are recommended by FEMA and the Red Cross: having a 3-day emergency kit, a family communication plan, and knowing where to get information during an emergency. Although emergency managers attempt to train the public, often they are only able to distribute brochures and make public notifications. For a variety of reasons, the public frequently ignores this guidance, leaving people more vulnerable during emergencies.

This book applies the process of social marketing, which has been used widely in public health and other disciplines, to the lack of public preparedness. Written for emergency managers in government and non-profit agencies, students, and volunteers, the book provides enough background and resources to enable the user to carry out an effective emergency preparedness campaign in their community and maintain it over time. Unlike preparing one message for everyone, social marketing involves working with smaller communities to identify what and how people want to learn, training them, and then maintaining that relationship to insure their preparedness. Because most emergency management agencies lack resources to take on such an initiative, the book provides readers with low cost methods to begin a social marketing program.

1

The Role of Preparedness in Building a Resilient Nation

What I’ve always found is that people will respond to meet a need in a crisis if they know what to do. You give people the opportunity to be part of something that will make a difference, and they will step up.

James Lee Witt, FEMA Director 1993–2000 (Ripley 2009, 211)

While few people would deny that public emergency preparedness is good and important, a large percentage of the U.S. population remains unprepared. This chapter begins with a review of a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences recommending specific actions to increase disaster resilience in all sectors given our current situation (e.g., increased frequency and severity of natural emergencies, climate change, aging infrastructure, demographic changes, etc.). The next section is a brief summary of several recent national surveys on public preparedness. Some of the reasons for lack of preparedness are then discussed along with ways to overcome them.

Disaster Resilience—A National Imperative

In 2011, the U.S. government, including eight agencies and one community resilience group affiliated with a National Laboratory, asked the National Research Council (NRC) to study how to increase the nation’s resilience to disasters. The NRC formed the Committee on Increasing National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters (Committee). This group of experts was asked to define “National Resilience” and how to increase it in the United States; provide goals, baselines, or metrics for resilience; describe current knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters; and identify other information and/or obstacles necessary to increase National Resilience to disasters (National Academy of Sciences 2012, 1–2).

The Committee convened three open meetings in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast; Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, Iowa; and Southern California. These parts of the country have all built resilience in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery (National Academy of Sciences 2012, viii).

In their final report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative (National Academy of Sciences 2012), the Committee defined National Resilience as “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events” (1). They chose to fulfill their charge by preparing a vision identifying the characteristics of a resilient nation in 2030. Those characteristics were:

In 2030, the nation, from individuals to the highest levels of government, has embraced a “culture of resilience.” Information on risks and vulnerability to individuals and communities is transparent and easily accessible to all. Proactive investments and policy decisions including those for preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery have reduced the loss of lives, costs, and socioeconomic impacts of disasters. Community coalitions are widely organized, recognized, and supported to provide essential services before and after disasters occur. Recovery after disasters is rapid and includes funding from private capital. The per capita federal cost of responding to disasters has been declining for a decade.

(National Academy of Sciences 2012, 14)

Following their report, during a workshop launching a national conversation about disaster resilience (National Academy of Sciences 2013), the Committee noted the urgency of breaking from the status quo because changing conditions are causing disasters to occur more often. More people are moving into areas that are prone to natural disasters. The number of people in the United States continues to grow and includes more seniors. The nation’s infrastructure is outdated. The amount of wetlands and other natural protections are declining. In part due to climate change, extreme weather events are increasing and their financial burden has outpaced the government’s ability to pay for mitigation and recovery (1–2).

The report concluded with six broad recommendations to begin implementing disaster resilience at the local, state, and federal levels. While the Committee suggested who might take the lead in coordinating community resilience efforts, including communication and collaboration networks between government agencies, the private sector, and nonprofits, that crucial element remained undefined. The authority and responsibility for this effort would be a massive undertaking requiring funding and intergovernmental cooperation that can sometimes be contentious and slow.

The first of the six recommendations was for the federal government to “incorporate national resilience as a guiding principle to inform the mission and actions of the federal government and the programs it supports at all levels” (209). The second recommendation had three components. The first encouraged cooperation between the public and private sectors to manage structural and nonstructural risk-reduction and “risk-spreading measures or tools” (212). This recommendation refers to coordination between community stakeholders on building codes and standards and on insurance that is based on local hazards.

The second component suggested that the Department of Homeland Security take the lead in working with other regional, professional, and private partners to develop “an essential framework (codes, standards and guidelines)” to address structural resilience (213). The third component was designed to heighten local awareness of hazard risks for all sectors and to reduce federal insurance subsidies through risk-based insurance pricing and multiyear policies. Those who adopted mitigation strategies could be rewarded with reduced premiums.

In its third recommendation, the Committee urged the National Science and Technology Council in the White House to work with other federal agencies, the private sector, and researchers to develop a national disaster database of “injuries, loss of life, property loss, and impacts on economic activity” (National Academy of Sciences 2012, 214). That information would be used to build quantitative models of risk and structural and social vulnerability. The fourth recommendation called for the Department of Homeland Security and other stakeholders to develop a National Resilience Scorecard that could be used as a baseline to monitor quantitative and qualitative changes in resilience. They suggested that it include a variety of factors, including the capability of infrastructure and business recovery; social capital; structural resilience to hazards, business, and market continuity; and the protection of people with special needs, including mobility, minority status, or health needs.

The Committee’s fifth recommendation was that the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services take the lead to help to create and sustain local and regional community resilience coalitions because of their ability to fund those efforts and provide technical support. They noted that this would require state and local government commitment to providing personnel to assist in completing the proposed National Resilience Scorecard (216). The final recommendation was that all federal agencies promote National Resilience in their programs and policies. In order to achieve this, the Committee proposed that agencies review their own policies and work together with others to fully coordinate the effort (217).

As of this writing, in mid-2014, we clearly have a long way to go to achieve the Committee’s 2030 vision of resilience. That vision will require structural measures, sound and progressive policies, and a paradigm shift toward individual and community self-reliance. On December 31, 2013, as a guest on Claire Rubin’s blog, Recovery Diva, John Plodinec of the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) posted “Reflections on Resilience.” In it, he recounted a story of foresters who were studying trees downed by wind, lightning, and disease. Although they were highly focused on the fallen trees, they recognized that they were more interested in what enabled the majority of trees to remain standing. Plodinec applies this lesson to community recovery and resilience, stating, “We must look to those still standing to understand resilience, not those who have been beaten down by the storm. If we are to become more resilient, we need to better understand what strengths are needed to recover from crises and how to nurture them.” Unfortunately, we rarely take a strength-based approach to change. In this book I will draw on some of those methods. But first we’ll review the most prominent surveys of public emergency preparedness.

Current Preparedness

By current standards in the United States (e.g., Ready.gov, American Red Cross), the public is not well prepared for emergencies. In 2006, the Council for Excellence in Government conducted a public readiness survey of 1,000 adults across the United States and 400 people in Chicago, Miami/Dade County, New York City, and San Francisco. The resulting Public Readiness Index (Council for Excellence in Government 2006) indicated that, of the 32 percent of people who had done nothing to prepare: “almost half (forty-five percent) simply have not thought about it; one-third (thirty-four percent) do not think an emergency will happen to them or their family; one-quarter think that nothing they can do would be effective; twenty-four percent do not want to think about it; twenty-one percent say that not knowing what to do is a major reason for their lack of preparedness; eighteen percent say it takes too much time; and sixteen percent say it costs too much money” (18).

In 2007, an American Public Health Association survey on preparedness for a public health crisis revealed that while “more than one-quarter (twenty-seven percent) of the public claim to be prepared… only half of those (fourteen percent) actually have a three-day supply of food, water, medication… And nearly half (forty-six percent) of the public have not pulled together a Disaster Supply Kit” (American Public Health Association 2007, 2).

In 2008, a national poll by the American Red Cross and the Council for Excellence in Government revealed that only 2 percent of the public had taken even one of the seven recommended Public Readiness Index actions defined as having a supply kit, a portable supply kit, a communications plan, a meeting place, having practiced or drilled, volunteered to help, or taken First Aid within the past five years (American Red Cross and the Council for Excellence in Government 2008, 2). According to a 2009 Citizen Corps National Survey, “fifty-seven percent of individuals reported having ‘supplies set aside in their home to be used only in case of a disaster’ … ‘forty-four percent of individuals reported having a household emergency plan’ and ‘fifty percent of respondents reported familiarity with alerts and warning systems’ ” (Federal Emergency Management Agency 2009, 1–2).

Greenberg, Dyen, and Elliott (2013) attempted to identify the characteristics of people who do prepare. They embedded six questions about preparedness in a U.S. Department of Energy survey about the public’s perception of different energy sources and nuclear waste management. Participants were asked whether they had a fire extinguisher in the home and knew how to use it, whether they had a family communication plan and a designated meeting place outside the home, a plan for sheltering at home for an extended period of time, and an emergency supply kit. The survey also included demographics, the respondent’s geographical location, and questions about trust and values.

The authors hypothesized that even strong negative memories of other people’s disasters (e.g., via media images) and personal experience with them may not be enough to prompt people to prepare. They suspected that in addition, people who prepared would hold conservative values such as self-reliance, a lack of trust in authority, resistance to changing the status quo, and would tend to be male. Their analysis supported the hypotheses. The difficulty with this group of prepared individuals lies with their potential lack of willingness to work with government-sponsored and community-preparedness groups and with others who do not hold their values. Greenberg, Dyen, and Elliott (2013) declined to suggest a role for these people, leaving that decision to local governments who can weigh the pros and cons of involving them in preparedness activities (e6). I have not seen other data that corroborates this study. It appears that these individuals are “survivalist” types, unlike emergency preparedness volunteers such as Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members across the United States, who, I suspect, vastly outnumber the former.

In order to determine disaster preparedness levels among older adults in the United States, Al-rouson, Rubenstein, and Wallace (2014) surveyed a subset of the 2010 Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The HRS is a “nationally representative cohort study that surveys the social, economic, and health characteristics of Americans aged fifty and older” (506). The researchers analyzed the results of eighteen disaster preparedness indicators within a “preparedness module” survey given to a portion of the respondents to the larger core survey.

They found that “about two-thirds of the study population had no emergency plan, had never participated in any disaster preparedness educational program, and were not aware of the availability of relevant resources. More than one-third of the respondents did not have a basic supply of food, water, or medical supplies … such deficits could result in further decline in health status, especially in the presence of mobility and functional limitations” (510). They emphasize that in addition to those previously mentioned, poverty, lack of transportation and communication equipment, and low educational attainment highlight the need for disaster plans specifically for older adults.

In a comprehensive review of death records from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, Brunkard, Namulanda, and Ratard (2008) documented at least 971 Katrina-related deaths in Louisiana and 15 evacuee deaths. They found that 49 percent of the victims in Louisiana were people 75 years old and older, “whereas their age cohort represents fewer than six percent of both the greater New Orleans and the overall Louisiana population … a total of 178 people seventy-five years old and older died in their homes, 115 from drowning” (5). The authors suggest at least two explanations, both of which likely contributed to the death toll. One is that older people may not have left their homes because they had evacuated before when the intensity of the storm was not as predicted and because of fear of looting or being unwilling to disrupt their routines. A second is that comorbidities caused drowning or injury (6). Many older persons develop physical and mental health conditions that make performing basic activities difficult on a normal day, much less under emergency conditions. Another important cause of injury and death during disasters is poverty.

Ripley (2009) emphasized the terrible effects of poverty, “Of all the people who died from natural disasters on the planet from 1985 to 1999, 65 percent came from nations with incomes below $760 per capita, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (McCarthy et al. 2001). She compared the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California to the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan that was similar in magnitude. The Northridge earthquake killed only 63 people, while the Pakistan earthquake killed about 100,000 (90). Ripley cites a study by Matthew Kahn (2005) at Tufts University who found that raising national GNP from $2,000 to $14,000 per person can save the lives of 530 people during a disaster. Money, which he called “liquid resilience,” also helps survivors to recover more quickly (Ripley 2009, 90).

Why Don’t People Prepare?

Lack of preparedness is due to a variety of factors, including not having any prior experience with an emergency or disaster, incorrect perception of actual risks, expectations that public safety forces will be able to help everyone all the time, a lack of information about how to prepare, feeling that there is nothing that can be done to prepare, and a lack of resources. Additional factors are a failure to exercise (i.e., drill or practice) plans that are in place, such as sheltering-in-place during tornado warnings. Because preparation is voluntary, other activities easily take priority in people’s lives. But Paton and McClure (2013) insist that it is not enough to know that some people have not prepared. We need to discover their reasoning in order to know how to help them to take action.

It is also important to analyze the actions that people say they have taken. Paton and McClure (50) cited Prior’s (2010) study of wildfire readiness, which showed that rather than preparing for a specific hazard, people are more likely to prepare with items that they use routinely, such as food. Lopes (1992) and other researchers have followed up self-reports of household preparedness and found differences bet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Role of Preparedness in Building a Resilient Nation
• 2 The Challenge: Moving from Complacency to Readiness
• 3 Identification of Priority Groups
• 4 Developing a Detailed Social Marketing Plan
• 5 Working with Your Local Community
• 6 Alternatives to Traditional Resources
• 7 Education, Social Marketing, and the Law
• Conclusion
• About the Author
• Index