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In response to our call for blegs, a reader named Lisa Klink writes to ask your advice:
I just started a job at the Red Cross teaching preparedness education. The tough part is convincing people to take action: make an emergency kit, have an evacuation plan, etc. My question for your readers is: You already know that you should be prepared in case of disaster. What would prompt you to actually do it?
Great question. And not so easy. People like me spend a lot of time telling people like you that so many “disasters” they worry about are extremely unlikely. On the other hand:
- 1. Disasters do happen
2. They are often very costly on a number of dimensions
3. That cost could presumably be curtailed by better preparedness, much of which is relatively cheap and easy
That said, you’re reading the words of a guy who lives in New York City, and who lived here during the 9/11 attack, and has two fairly young children, and still never thought it worthwhile to load up a “go bag” with Cipro and cash.
So give Lisa your best advice in the comments section below (and vote up the other comments you think are valid). FWIW, the Red Cross may want to just steal a new crazy/brilliant campaign the Centers for Disease Control unleashed a few days ago, urging preparedness in case of zombie apocalypse. Yes, zombie apocalypse. Yes, the CDC.
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I don’t think it can be done “without freaking them out”. Emotions are powerful drivers of actions.
A lack of freaking out is why people can get a personal genome test done, discover that they’re at high risk for heart disease, and still not bother to exercise. If you want the typical person to take action, then you need to push the fear button (just maybe not very far).
What exactly you do depends on which disaster you can plausibly expect. Earthquake areas need year-round preparation, which is hard to maintain. Tornado, hurricane, and wildfire areas are better off. Seasonal preparation is easier to achieve: You put “first day of spring: get 3 gallons of bottled water for tornado season” on your calendar, just like people put “New Year’s Day: check batteries in smoke detector” on the calendar. (In fact, getting Dear Abby to put out such a reminder would likely be highly effective.)
If you’re determined not to use fear as a motivation, you can try snob appeal (“If you do this, then when the Big One hits, your family will be sitting pretty, thanks to your excellent work, but your neighbors won’t have water or…”) or supervision (“I’m going to come back next week, and I hope that your preparations are further along by then…”), but I think those will only work with a small subset of the population.
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But I don’t think that ‘freaking people out’ is a good thing. You put stress on people, increase their fears, maybe even create phobias. Not somthing a Red Cross teacher would want to provoke, I guess
I have created a scavenger hunt with my kids to make first aid kits amongst other things…it will work
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I posted before seein your suggestion. As I said in my other comment, games can be the most effective way to encourage this kind of things. And they work on people of all ages if well designed (:
I might have a good answer. For finding that answer I reccomend chapter ten of the book ‘Reality is Broken’ by Jane McGonigal [http://amzn.to/jV5taN]. It talks about how to use games to motivate people to put positive psichology advices into practice, wich can be hard to do. I think that the ideas there might be adapted to the bleg. I algo personally think that games might be the best way to motivate people to do things an follow advise they would otherwise not do or follow.
I was going to say a very similar thing.
Making a game out of anything makes a “fear” into a “fun”.
Encourage volunteering with VOADs and local volunteer units of emergency management. CERT, RACES, ARES, SAR, etc. People won’t prepare unless they have a really good reason, and being involved with organization and agencies like the ones mentioned above give people a good reason.
Generally, there is a surge of volunteerism after a disaster. Disasters that get national coverage usually cause a nationwide surge of volunteers. 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina caused a spike of volunteerism within the emergency management field. Expect a spike this year with the recent violent tornado outbreak and the flooding of the Mississippi River.
Now would be an excellent time to develop a recruitment and retention program for your agency or organization. Completion of FEMA independent study course IS-244.a will provide some really great information.
I volunteer with local emergency management in RACES and SAR as the recruitment and retention team leader. I am also enlisted in the Michigan Air National Guard and am an Air Force Emergency Management apprentice.
Perhaps the Japanese could provide some inspiration. Every year in September to commemorate the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 which killed about 250,000 people, they have a national disaster drill. It’s really big and involved, and it’s very participatory. There are firefighting trucks and helicopters and individuals get to put out fires with a fire extinguisher and practice evacuations and other fun stuff.
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I absolutely agree. Drills are the best way to get people motivated to prepare for disasters.
An annual full scale, city wide drill would get a lot of individuals and groups thinking about what would happen in case of a disaster, but is very difficult to arrange. Neighborhood, single family, or single business drills are easier to arrange, and good practice for the Red Cross ‘Drill Team’ doing the advertising. On an even smaller scale, role playing scenarios or thought exercises can be quite convincing, so long as the desired outcome is made easy to act upon. For example, if you want people to build emergency kits, have kits on hand for sale with all of the generic items inside.
Speaking of having kits for sale, the Red Cross backpack kits are a great idea. I have a few suggestions:
1) Offer kits for children. Children who grow up being ready for emergencies will continue to value emergency preparedness as adults.
2) Simplify! If you were a retail business, you’d want to offer various colors and styles. As a disaster preparedness mission, offering superficial choices distracts from your mission. I should not go to your website, meeting, or store and think, “Which one should I buy?” I should only think, “How many do I need to keep my family safe?”
3) Improve your online store. Right now it’s difficult to navigate, and the language is unclear.
4) Get the prices down. I’m sure the Red Cross is already buying in bulk and getting good prices, but you could probably sell advertising space on most of those items. Every company that has a logo on an item has an interest in advertising your product along with theirs.
“Johnson & Johnson Band-Aids – They’re in every Red Cross emergency kit. Do you have yours ready to protect your family?” spokesperson holds up a Red Cross kit and puts Band-Aids inside, “Johnson & Johnson and the Red Cross are looking out for you.”
I don’t know if there’s anything you can really say to someone to convince them to be prepared. I think you need a significant amount of “training” to be able to think in a way that makes them prepared for things without freaking out. For example, every time I walk into a room, I scan for exits and for weird behavior of anyone that could be threating my safety. It’s not something I think about and I’m not so paranoid that I don’t go out and have a fun time, it’s just something I do out of habit. I think I’m pretty good with being alert to my surroundings, but I went on a ride-along with a police officer friend of mine and he kept pointing out “situations” that I missed. But he’s had 10 years on the force plus lots of training to look out for that stuff.
So back to disasters. If someone doesn’t have the mindset to plan ahead without freaking out. I think the only way to convince them is to actually train them like police and military are. Signs, posters, 30-second ad spots won’t work, they need to have the mindset of “things could get real bad and I need to be responsible for myself.” I have a number of bug-out kits depending on how much time I have to load my truck and get out. I don’t think about them at all, I’m not a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but they’re there and ready. Came in handy when we got evacuated for a wildfire near our house.
I would say don’t exaggerate on what is actually needed. Keep it down to life sustaining items only. (One is not likely to die of exposure in Florida, etc. so blankets are probably not vital.)
It can be cheap to free. If people have camping gear, they already have preparedness items. All they have to do is keep the necessities in their own container/bag apart from the rest of the unnecessray gear so it is readily accessible.
That being said, I think it is often a waste of time.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2011/05/19/alberta-slave-lake-.html
I’m not a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but they’re there and ready.
That’s it in a nutshell. Culture change. If you want disaster preparedness to be more widespread it has to have less stigma. When our culture allows MRP to write without irony, “It’s not that I think I’m exceptionally cool or trendy, but they’re there and ready.” then you’ll have your problem solved.
It also wouldn’t hurt if more people lived in closer touch with their own needs. All else being equal, disasters seem to be best weathered by those who are already aware of their own survival needs for other reasons and are close to them. Back-packers, soldiers, farmers, ranchers, etc…