Risk and Crisis Communication

Introduction

• Risk communication necessitates aligning communicator and audience trust, involvement, and emotional responses.
• New media transforms risk landscape.
• Effective risk messaging involves trust, emotions, proximity, severity, tolerance, and prior experiences.
• Crafting messages requires effectively addressing special needs populations like children, the elderly, those with literacy difficulties, activists, and minority groups.
• Considers the role of traditional and new media and discusses communication during specific threat or risk phases.
• Outlines factors for effective risk communication, such as audience understanding, message delivery, and adaptability.
• Best practices stem from experience, communication theories, and academic evidence, translating findings for officials facing homeland security threats.

Defining Risk and Crisis Communication

• Risk communication: Information exchange among interested parties about risk.
• Crisis communication: Managing information and meaning during prevention, response, and post-crisis learning.
• Risk is a nebulous, evolving entity, while a crisis is a short-term, specific event.
• Risk communication utilizes experts, while crisis communication uses authoritative figures.
• Risk is controlled and structured, while a crisis is spontaneous and reactive.

Publics and Risk Perception

• Public risk perception can be influenced by the event's voluntariness, controllability, and familiarity.
• Public risk perception can be influenced by equity, benefits, reversibility, uncertainty, dread, and ethical/moral nature.
• Public risk perception can be influenced by human or natural origin, victim identity, and catastrophic potential.
• Public risk perception can be influenced by the public’s understanding, trust in institutions, and personal stakes in the event.
• Effective approaches to risk communication involve dialogue, trust-building, and community involvement.
• Lack of trust can increase risk perception and stigma.
• Truthful, consistent, and updated information from trusted sources is critical.

Publics and Trust

• Public's trust in risk managers and communicators influences risk acceptance.
• Trust requires consistency and ensures connection between organizational words and actions.
• Trust reduces uncertainty and influences risk perception.
• Building dialogue and consensus between organizations and the public is more effective than simply spreading information.
• Town halls or community meetings can be used to gather feedback for use during an event.
• Communication with publics based on trust and meaningful dialogue increases public support for decisions made by risk communicators.
• Efforts to build trust by providing risk response information might increase the public’s sense of risk.
• A high degree of trust in a person or institution can co-exist with a relatively high degree of skepticism, but the audience will still trust the messages and the communicator.

Publics’ Emotional Responses

• Intense emotional states can cause a variety of public responses.
• Controllable crises yield anger and grief, while fear occurs when a crisis is uncontrolled.
• Distinguished emotions include gratitude, love, interest, anger, frustration and fear.
• Primary negative emotions in risk and crisis include anger, sadness, fright, and anxiety.
• Addressing anger following an event assists in crafting risk messages to encourage desired behavioral responses.
• Anger can reduce dread risk perceptions and negative risk estimates and also motivates people into action.
• A public unable to cope with loss and regain control will likely turn to fear.
• Communicators should suggest specific actions, like preparedness activities, to help the public.
• Acknowledging and understanding public sentiment can aid in developing appropriate, effective messages from communicators.
• The emotions, anger, fear, and anxiety should be given specific coping strategies; sadness should be addressed with comfort and support.

Publics’ Proximity to Risk

• Proximity to danger impacts risk perceptions and needs to be understood by the communicator.
• Providing useful information about threats is more effective than emphasizing extent of risk.
• Details on responses to high proximity events are remembered better compared to those that are less proximate.
• Physically close organizations are seen as aids, not obstacles, resulting in trustworthiness.
• Temporal proximity (events happening soon) impacts communication.
• Future events are more likely to induce analytic processing of information.

Severity of Risk

• The likelihood that they will actually prepare decreases as public belief that personal consequences will be severe also increases.
• Positive outcome expectancies increase beliefs in the efficacy of preparation and the ability to make an impact.
• When the public has negative outcome expectancies, information must be provided to distinguish between uncontrollable causes and consequences.
• Using specific evidence that reflects a public's cultural beliefs and values is the most effective message structure.
• Anecdotal messages are best at altering severity of risk perceived and changing consideration the public is willing to give a message.

Tolerability of Risk

• The tolerability of risk (ToR) framework informs on how society can improve how risks are tolerated.
• With consistent, transparent, ToR helps understand, evaluate, and prepare for handling public safety risks.
• Communication should convey the need for risk acceptance and costs of reducing risk.
• Communication needs transparency in how risk is being reduced, given the posed unique challenges.
• The ToR framework encompasses three layers: broadly acceptable, tolerable to secure benefits, and unacceptable regardless of benefits.

Publics’ Prior Relationships with Risk and Risk Communicators

• Institutions with past crises face increased attributes of responsibility, resulting in decreased public understanding and difficult message creation.
• A reputation is built through direct experience with the organization, which requires substantial knowledge.
• If the public believes they have little information on a subject, they will follow a heuristic method of processing information.
• Lack of knowledge leads to fear and lack of comfort with new information.
• Prior knowledge of a risky topic leads to systematic processing and attending to context-relevant information.

Special Factors in Relating to Publics

• Special-needs publics refer to any group not reached effectively with mass communication channels during emergencies.
• Diverse publics require representative messaging, trust, and collective decision making by being represented.
• Communicators should not assume that all publics are of one mind because the public can be disinterested in directed messages.
• Organizations should distinguish between publics that do not prepare and publics seeking guidance in preparation.
• Risk communicators should consider public interest if they are uninformed, misinformed, or have barriers to participation.

Special Needs Populations

• Children, the elderly and disabled, racial and ethnic minority groups, activist groups and white males are all examples of specific populations.
• Those in charge of children during risk situations tend to carefully weigh perceived risks and benefits.
• Elderly populations may perceive a situation as riskier, relying more on emotions when in that state.
• Age also impacts information preference, with elderly participants less likely to use new technology.
• Risk managers face challenges locating elderly members of the community who are also disabled.
• Special accommodation and warning communication requires special accommodations.
• Deaf evacuees were assigned to a special “Deaf Area” during Hurricane Katrina with a dearth of signing translators.
• Attempts to reach the full public require accommodations for visual, hearing, and other sensory limitations.
• The American Red Cross allows disabled individuals to assess and create plans for personal disaster.
• FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) also creates resources for safety during a disaster.

Special Needs Populations: Less Numerate Populations

• Risk communication can be made more complex when publics struggle to understand imparted messages.
• Determining mathematical literacy includes asking for public preference of information: visual, verbal, fraction, or decimal elements.
• Less numerate publics will desire verbal and visual elements; if forced to chose mathematically, a preference for fractions over decimals should be given.
• Low numeracy includes interpretation, following instruction, and interventions to make material comprehensible.
• There must be knowledge of which mathematical skills to use for tasks, as multi-step processing will overwhelm an audience.
• Social math (associating a statistic with an individual) appears more personal to the individual.

Special Needs Populations: Racial and Ethnic Minorities

• Research has suggested to engage key and public leaders, incorporate cultural considerations, and to develop trusting relationships and regular information sessions.
• Leaders need to frame crisis situations to give attention and voice to groups, provide legitimacy, and reassert the importance of a clear overall response.
• To reach people in power with the race, the increased rate of message acceptance includes following evacuation orders.
• Within the United States, people of color may use social networks for media and treat mass media as reliable sources.
• If the crisis spokesperson is from their home country, this is especially true for immigrant communities.

Other Important Populations: Activists

• Local, national, and international activist groups contribute to risk and crisis by gathering, researching, and reporting.
• They project credibility to those with ability to learn, especially through Internet self-publishing, with an intent to change conditions or sustain activism.
• Activist publics identify needs for change earlier than the rest of the public, shaping interpretations.
• Activists can contribute with a community spirit, they can also utilize message framing, dialogic, and hate language.

Other Important Populations: White Males

• A key demographic studied in risk perception indicates that white males perceive risks differently than other genders and races.
• White males perceive lower levels of risk because of greater involvement in creating, managing, controlling, and benefitting from technology and activities.
• Protectiveness of identity indicates cultural understanding is necessary in relation to communication and risk, where communication is key.
• Information must be transmitted with acceptance and compatible cultural commitments when connected to risk.
• Information must affirm recipients' values as information challenging commonly held beliefs can negate communication.

Implications for Risk Communication for Special Needs Populations

• Striving for representation is effective, along with tailoring messages.
• Publics who want to prepare amid risk needing guidance should be distinguished from the people who don't want to.
• Implementing professional traits from assistance, medical training, childcare, and visual aid when helping is effective.
• Keeping messaging simple while connecting information on touch stones and keeping it culturally understanding is effective.

Organizational and Public Media Usage

• During disasters, public media consumption increases, requiring timely, accurate, specific, sufficient, consistent, and understandable messages.
• As public belief in mass media increases message processing, organizations should consider their outlets.
• Effective use of social media must involve potential impact, security, and public awareness.
• Journalists report news items to gather the most attention that might cause selectivity bias in what aspects of the risk are reported.
• This has a profound effect on public awareness and insights.
• Television is still one of the top two outlets (with physicians) for routine and crisis communication, which leads to needing information desired within public.

Organizational and Public Media Usage: Adaptations

• Focus must be generalized to media, as adapted by multiple private and public organizations.
• During a SARS outbreak in 2003, the Singapore Ministry of Health exclusively released updates and recordings on a SARS television channel.
• Adaptable solutions to a national crisis included allowing questions after press conferences, without the pressure of any reporter getting exclusive information.

Organizational and Public Media Usage: Successful Strategies

• Additional successful strategies might include crafting multiple messages, even amid attempts to speak with one voice.
• Design and delivery warning messages can be improved with communication style and technologies.
• Suggestions might include ensuring messages are current while being standardized, while also remaining adaptable, with writing being both professional while accessible.
• When using via mass media, consider how media covered similar hazards and how the public is being asked to engage in behavior.
• In Los Angeles County, California (2009), one study showed warnings became more effective, being specific about who was evacuated, how, and when, from who recommenced it.

Organizational and Public Media Usage: Social Media, Efficacy, and Action

• Social media should involve interactivity, responsiveness, and dialogue in crisis situations.
• While the Internet allows better distribution of information, increased intake allows the possibility of overload.
• During a Twitter event, updates, warnings, answers, commentary, and information (warnings, updates, answers) were more abundant in contrast to personal impact.
• Organizations and institutions engaging with publics can better understand their expectations (McAllister-Spooner, 2009), which increases responses (Yang, Kang, & Johnson, 2010).
• By following and analyzing these messages, they can act swiftly with information that is relevant, given a comprehension and perceptive stage in mind.
• Publics on social utilize mostly what others on social media use, which has implications in privacy and what communicators can do in said situation.
• Social has impacts on sources from where the public gets information from.
• Bog information was also important in tailoring media to disseminate effectively.

Organization and Public Media Usage: Resilience

• New media can play a role in the resilience of publics depending what its' role is in pre-crisis.
• Risk communicators in training and education should know what the public is up to reach is.
• To integrate new media and planning for resilience means empowering and involving publics in plans (Liu & Briones, 2012).

Implications for Risk Communication: Media Usage

• There must be public belief to maintain media as the function increase depth.
• Messages must remain complete, accurate, sufficient, consistent, and above all; understandable.
• Risk messages are more likely to cause someone to act as an effect as action can come from all angles.
• If there is already social pre-crisis, the resilience should.
• Integrate traditional/social from social content being utilized and accurate information being produced from both sides.

Risk Communication Phases and Communication during Preparedness Phase

• Phase breakdown into three steps can apply for both publics and communicators: preparedness, response, and recovery.
• Crisis preparedness can enhance resilience and develop infrastructure for special messaging.
• Community involvement in preparedness increases tolerance, which allows communicating and testing messages for certain demographics with channels.
• Organizations improve their messaging for public consumption and follow information, with the result being multiple establishments providing the same thing.
• Creating relationships before risk can create a positive impact.

Public Warnings: The Best Advice Is Preparation

• Key sources and establishments need to provide a system of warnings before any sign of a coming threat.
• Several systems have been investigated for buildings and organizations already, in relation to protection and communication.

Myths in Public Warnings

• It's rare for someone to panic until they can't outrun certain scenarios.
• The public can alter the warning to expose individuals to even worse hazards.
• With short and simple messages, if there is adequate follow-up, it starves the message from having the necessary information.
• The public is easily productive if there a good amount of sirens sounded.
• Effective messages must include understanding how the public responds.
• Factors that can matter to the public include the source, means, consistency, accuracy, understandability, and how often the message is relayed.
• A public exposed to cancelled messages and warnings previously becomes less willing to follow them.