For the past ten years, every time I have taught a class on crisis communication, I have asked my students to engage in an exercise where they must write an emergency alert for escaped/missing honeybees. They're given information about the time the bees were last seen in a lab plus a description of their hardiness and some of their behaviors. Then they're told "you have 10 minutes to write a message; people's lives could be in danger."
The really engaged students will scramble to look up maps of the area, determine how quickly a bee might fly in different weather conditions, find information about bee behavior, consider the specific impacts on vulnerable populations, and develop instructions on how people can protect themselves. The most clever students have included strategies for people to report bee sitings using social media hashtags. You can read about the course materials here at Communication Teacher (Sutton & Kaufman, 2017)
We know that bees can certainly be a hazard that requires a response, and possibly a warning, but this week we saw it unfold in real life in Mc Allen, Texas where bees attacked and injured a victim and first responders, prompting a Wireless Emergency Alert sent to people in the area of the bees. This is a message that follows the guidelines from the Warning Response Model and even integrates the use of ALL CAPS to help emphasize key contents. Let's go through it using the WRM checklist...
Source: McAllen Fire Department
Hazard: BEES ATTACKING
Location: the area of 1900 Block of West Hackberry
Guidance: AVOID the area. Remain indoors
Time: not included, but implied by active verb "attacking"
Additional information: phone number to call
I wonder if the McAllen Fire Department had a plan for issuing this kind of message. Did they have a template already developed? Did they have highly trained and highly skilled information officers on duty at the time? Did they use the Warning Lexicon to help with contents and message workflow?
However they were able to pull together a stinger-of-a-message, they did it quickly and they did it well. Bravo, Mc Allen Fire Department!
There are plenty of resources available to help you and your organization to write effective messages in a pinch. Be sure to bookmark and download The Warning Lexicon - it's free and offers step-by-step instructions on how to write a better warning message.
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