|
|
The Road to Ready Provided a Pathway for Public AwarenessBy Rick Tobin Americans and their small business ventures are not adequately prepared for interruptions from natural and human-caused disasters. The statistics vary for how unprepared the American public remains, but in the end numbers alone do not truly express the shortfall. Every emergency manager knows there is a huge gap in readiness. Attacking this issue through public outreach produces some positive results, but most programs are hit and miss, using the shotgun effect, with the hopes that those with needs will be drawn to websites, brochures, booths at fairs and even social networking. FEMA even uses a You Tube format to interest public viewers. All of these efforts have made some difference, but not enough to justify the cost in time and budget. The publics that must be targeted for compelling positive changes are ever changing in respect to age, education, location and a dozen other demographics. This is the maddening and disappointing aspect of public awareness projects. Measuring the public’s performance and actual improvements as outcomes from any effort is at best vague. The measure of how many people actually look at materials has also been hard to acquire in hit-or-miss applications. The positive results of ‘edutainment’ (a term claimed by many as original since the 1960s) always fascinated me as promising high potential for bringing valued emergency tools and concepts to the public forum. In 2008 I was approached by a brilliant radio producer who held that same opinion. Jane Asher, founder of the company Voice Over Vision, offered an Internet radio show outlet for my concept to use edutainment to reach the younger and more savvy Americans that are now drifting away from television, print and terrestrial radio. After a month of effort I produced a solid five-year plan for the Road to Ready Internet radio show as a pilot project to address the preparedness gap. The core elements of the show included my brief, strong, friendly and opinionated blog to open the show, followed by segments on a particular concern (like fire, hurricane, food protection, evacuation, etc.), a few lessons learned from my own mistakes (endearing the audience with the fact that I certainly am human and don’t always make the right decisions), some direct actions individuals could take to avoid mistakes (noted as the First Ten Plays), a lengthy related interview with an author, expert, or field practitioner with experience, and finally a show closure featuring ideas from interesting websites and detail on upcoming seminars and conferences to help educate professionals and the public. Although I hosted the entire show, I attempted to focus the content on information for the audience, and not on me. That is very important for edutainment to work. The audience must know that the show considers them first, which was always the case with the Road to Ready. The content of materials in the Road to Ready was kept at the thousand-foot level, with frequent breaks, and a little levity when appropriate. The listener never felt forced into a lecture hall or berated for being unprepared. The program also avoided fear tactics, which have proven a failure by every level of government and the private sector. The idea was to make the hour show, once a week, feel like a safe haven to bring out a few new ideas that might help people. My thirty years in disaster operations brought a situational awareness needed to plan shows that would meet the seasonal and likely topical interests of the public. This was necessary since the shows had to be scheduled at least three months ahead of their broadcast. The show had strong financial support from ESi (the makers of WebEOC) from the beginning, which helped ensure the continuity of the programming. In addition, to enhance the outreach, and attract an even wider audience, I developed (with my webmaster, Chris Martinez) a simple and useful website featuring the MP3 archives of all the past Road to Ready shows, the hot links for useful websites, and a compendium of the sheets of the First Ten Plays. Everything was free to the listener, and still is. [An archive site for all of the radio shows is in development. The Continuity e-GUIDE will feature a link to the archives when they are available.] So, how did the show perform? The first Road to Ready aired on April 25, 2008 with practically no advertising or announcements. I had time and funds for very limited news releases, but I used my massive e-mail listing to contact people I thought might be interested. The show did very well from the very beginning. Many Internet radio shows have humble beginnings and never exceed that start. By the end of the series, on May 1, 2009, there were 10,000 listeners every week from 87 countries. The show was hugely successful and received praise from every quarter. Although the economic downturn created fiscal pressures that could not be overcome, the model and my vision for edutainment were proved through the making of the fifty-three programs. Although the Road to Ready has been off the air for months, people from around the world still download the archives as individuals, businesses and from all levels of government. The topics and approaches to outreach worked and the program content still generates a continuous stream of users. That was my goal. My producer, my guests, and the listeners made edutainment for public readiness a victory, which in a more prosperous time might even have lead to national syndication. However, the pilot proved that the public is both interested and eager to listen to messages about readiness when offered freely in an environment without fear or apprehension. Rick Tobin |
