Why are some warning messages followed, while others are ignored or misunderstood? Why do some messages make it through to your audience, whereas some do not? To create messages that are successful, it is important to understand both the characteristics of your audience - preferred modality, location, etc., as well as the characteristics of each of your messages. It is also necessary to ensure you have the right infrastructure to support your message delivery, during any type of incident.

1. Warnings: What Works, What Doesn’t
and Why
Dr. Robert Chandler, Ph.D.
Director, University of Florida
Marc Ladin
Chief Marketing Officer, Everbridge

2. About Everbridge
• Everbridge empowers better decisions with
interactive communications throughout the
incident lifecycle to protect your most important
assets
• The world’s recognized leader in incident
notification and management solutions
• Everbridge helps more than 30 million people
communicate in a crisis and connect on a daily
basis.
• The company’s notification platform is backed
by an elastic infrastructure model that delivers
near infinite scale, advanced mobile
connectivity, and real-time reporting and
analytics.
l ti
• More than 1,000 organizations in over 100
countries rely on Everbridge for their
emergency needs
2

3. Agenda
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Part 1 Presentation
P t 1: P t ti
• Best practices for message construction
• Communication planning tips and goals
• Message delivery strategies
Part 2: Q&A
3

4. Note:
Q&A Presentation slides are available on
our Slideshare account at:
http://www.slideshare.net/everbridge
Use the
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submit your
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4

5. Bracing for the 2010
Warnings: What Works
Hurricane Season Works,
What Doesn’t and Why
Dr.
Dr Robert Chandler
University of Central Florida

6. Warnings Often Fail to “Work”
Work
• Scientific research on the efficacy of warnings of risk
began in the 1950s greatly expanded in the 1980s
1950s,
due to the increasing number of product liability cases
• In general, the empirical research findings bear
out the theoretical and conceptual studies carried
out by communication studies scholars as well
as sociologists anthropologists and designers
sociologists, anthropologists,
• They demonstrate that the effect of a warning message on a person's
behavior is unpredictable: although a warning can be noticed, read, and
acted upon, it is just as likely to be missed ignored or have an effect
upon missed, ignored,
opposite to the one intended
• Compliance is rarely found above 50% of participants, and in some cases it
is lower th 25%
i l than

7. No Automatic Compliance For Warnings
• Studies demonstrate over and over again that there is no “sure fire” warning
message that consistently ensures compliance
• Risk warning communication — whether on consumer products, labels,
signposts or documents —a re too often inadequate and ineffective,
because their design does not take into account the many psychological
and socio-psychological factors involved in producing an effective warning
message
These include (and there are others):
• the number of warnings a person is exposed to
• the past experience of the person
• the motivation and interest of the person
• the person's perception of the likelihood of the risk
• the person's attitude toward risk
• the perceived cost or effort involved in compliance
(including actually reading the warning notice itself)

8. Guidelines and Key Message Factors
• Risk communication messages are an important
aspect for any response. Such messages are
designed to communicate warnings, threats,
consequences, dangers,
consequences dangers and specific/general
behavioral guidelines/requests to key audiences
• These messages typically seek
comprehension, understanding,
and some level of behavioral
compliance from the individuals
targeted

9. Risk Warnings Often Fail to Warn
• Unfortunately, warnings often fail to change people's behavior. Either the
warning goes unnoticed or as increasingly happens the warning is seen but
unnoticed, or, happens,
ignored
• For many years, designers focused their
years
concern on sensory aspects of
warnings: color, shape, location,
pictures vs text size and so on
vs. text, on.
However, research suggests that
effective warning messages depend as
much on th contents of the viewer's
h the t t f th i '
head as on the contents of the
warning message

10. Analyze the Target Audience
• You can’t communicate effectively without understanding your intended
audience and are able to predict how they will understand and respond to
your messages:
• Languages
• V
Vocabulary
b l
• Interpretation (including reading between
the lines)
• C
Comprehension and d i i making
h i d decision ki
processes
• Valence and Salience
• There is no substitute for assessing and analyzing the people in the
intended target audience how they would interpret a message, before
releasing it t th world
l i to the ld

11. Never Withhold Key Warning Information
• One often hears "experts" predict mass panic in an emergency. Yet
studies since the London blitz during World War II through the 9-11
events have shown that people behave responsibly, even bravely, in
crises
• The duty for risk disclosure outweighs the fear of negative response
• Transparency and honesty builds your credibility and increases the
likelihood that your messages will be received and considered

12. Warning Effectiveness
The problem with warnings is that they often fail to actually warn those at risk
• Key for Effective Warnings
• Deliver the Warning
g
• Attention to the Warning
• Selection (elaboration) of the Warning
• Valence
• Salience
• Perception/Processing of the Warning
• Language
• V
Vocabulary
b l
• Decision-making orientations
• Behavioral Reponses (Action) to the Warning

13. Ensure That You Connect With Your Audience
• Achieving and sustaining
effective communication with your target
audiences depends (in part) on selecting
channels (modalities) of communication
that will reach them and allow them to
reach back to you
• There are options to enhance the
effectiveness and success of
communicating risk warning messages
including new emerging modalities
• Consider both your messages and
your target audiences in selecting the
most appropriate communication
notification systems
tifi ti t

14. Perception/Processing of the Warning
• Once the warning is
perceived, the respondent
must properly understand its
meaning
• Warning messages should be
clear and easily understood
understood,
but it is difficult to ensure
clarity for several reasons;
Sentences may be poorly
constructed or contain words
that are unfamiliar

15. Sometimes People Ignore Warnings
• Another reason that warnings are often
ineffective and misunderstood is that they
are designed by people who already know
about the hazard and are highly familiar with
the events, processes, and procedures
• These designers are too often unable to put
themselves in the place of a naive user who
approaches the product for the first time
• Warnings should b t t d on t i l
W i h ld be tested typical
audiences in advance of an actual crisis or
disaster

16. Behavioral Reponses to the Warning
• Even if the respondent understands
the warning they still may not comply
• One common reason is that people
perform a mental cost-benefit analysis
where perceived likelihood and
severity of the hazard are weighed
against cost of compliance
• Any factors which increase
cost or reduce perceived risk
(such as product familiarity) will hurt
compliance
• It is imperative to understand the decision
making orientation of your target audiences in
order to create messages with higher p p
g g propensity to
y
trigger appropriate behavioral responses

17. Overload and Familiarity
People who have experienced events
or warnings many times with no
negative consequences (and possibly
ti ( d ibl
know of other people who have had
similar experiences) will be less likely to
comply with warnings
l ith i

18. Psychological Dispositions
• People who see a warning must
decide whether or not to comply,
however, "warning targets"
(people for whom the warning is
intended) are not blanks slates but
rather start with a mental
framework that leads them to
process information in particular
ways
• Warnings must “fit’ the
g
preconceived assumptions and
expectations and frames of the
audiences

19. More Effective Warning Messages
• There is more to creating effective warnings than choosing the right
modality, format, color, size,
modality format color size location and font or even the right message
• It is imperative to understand what the target audience member is trying to
achieve and how the warning affects attainment of those goals
• Crisis communication planners must consider the decision calculations that the
respondent is likely to perform
• Crisis communication planners must consider the audience experience and
knowledge and how they interact with their social world

20. Tailor the Warning Message to Target the
Audience
A di
It makes little difference if you headed your warning with:
or
and put the wording of the warning in big bold print and placed it within a
black-bordered box
These graphic devices may seem to you to make your warning noticeable to
p p ,
people, but it does not appear to do so
pp

21. Perception is Reality
• A warning message is only
perceived as a warning- when it is
part of the “conversation” between
the message and its audience
• A warning must speak to the
reader,
reader taking into consideration:
• The context of the warning
• The placement of the warning
• The content of the warning

22. Incident Notification
Marc Ladin
Chief Marketing Officer, Everbridge
22

23. Incident Notification Solutions Address
Common C
C Communication Ch ll
i ti Challenges
• Reduce miscommunications • Communicate quickly, easily,
and control rumors with and efficiently with large
accurate, consistent messages numbers of people in minutes,
not hours, making sure that the
• Satisfy regulatory lines of communication are open
requirements with extensive and
complete reporting of • Receive feedback from your
communication attempts and messages by using polling
two-way acknowledgements f
t k l d t from capabilities
biliti
recipients
• Ensure two-way
• Deliver refined, prepared ,
refined communications to get
timed messages to each pre- feedback from message
designated audience group, by receivers
scenario
23

24. The Everbridge Advantage
Existing Competitor’s Infrastructure:
• Static algorithms based on capacity
limitations, not actual call volumes
li it ti t t l ll l
during a disaster
- Failure-prone from unexpected
volumes of message output
g
- No ability to burst to meet wide-scale
system usage
The Everbridge Advantage:
• Near-infinite scale achieved
- Multiple redundant VoiP & PSTN
p
providers
- Elastic capacity accommodates
highest volume of outbound calls in
the industry

25. Everbridge’s Elastic Infrastructure Model
What is it?
• Elastic infrastructure integrates
with multiple, redundant on-
demand communications
providers
• Provides near infinite scale,
capacity, performance and
processing resources
• Dynamically looking into
performance and proactively
enhance the performance of
notifications delivered
tifi ti d li d
• Provable, measurable performance
through Everbridge’s mass
recipient em lator
emulator

26. Key Evaluation Criteria for an Incident
Notification System
• Infrastructure scale and resilience
• Experience and expertise
• Ease of use
• Ability to reach all contact paths including
paths,
voice, email, native SMS (over SMPP and
SMTP), IM, and more
• Ease of integration
26

27. Note:
Q&A Presentation slides are available on our
Slideshare account at:
http://www.slideshare.net/everbridge
Use the
Q&A
function to
submit your
b it
questions.
27

28. Everbridge Resources
On-Demand Webinars:
Contact Information www.everbridge.com/webinars
White papers, case studies and more
www.everbridge.com/resources
Follow us:
Dr. Robert Chandler www.everbridge.com/blog
@everbridge
Robert.chandler@ucf.edu facebook.com/everbridgeinc
Marc Ladin
Marc.ladin@everbridge.com
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