Over-Alerting: Episode 6

CONTENT!

Over-alerting is not just about frequency and relevancy. It's also about what you include in the message. 

Over the past few weeks, I've been writing about the dimensions of over-alerting that Michele M Wood and I defined in our recently published paper Opting Out: Over Alerting in the Era of Wireless Emergency Alerts. The one final dimension is CONTENT. 

Our study participants explained that messages that are incomplete, incomprehensible, and not actionable, they fall into the definition of being over-alerted.

>These are the messages that don't contain enough information to make sense of the context, the hazard, and its impacts.

>These are the messages that are filled with jargon like "level 2 - go status" or "active threat."

>They are also the messages that don't indicate what people can or should do to protect themselves from danger. 

Instead of motivating action, what these messages do accomplish is to drive people to search for more information to make sense of them; lead people to become frustrated by them; and, quite possibly, result in people turning them off. 

And yet, a complete, jargon-free, actionable message is the ONE THING that a risk communicator can absolutely control in every warning that is issued. 

Think about it. You cannot control the threat. You cannot control it's impact. You cannot control the social context. You cannot control the latency of channels. You cannot control what people decide to do, how, or when. What you CAN control is what your message says. And we know that a GOOD message can motivate action, moving people to safety.

You can get access to the open-access version of the paper here: Opting Out: Open Access.