It’s a well-known fact among emergency managers that funds spent on preparedness and mitigation efforts saves money when it comes time to recover from a disaster. A 2005 study commissioned by FEMA and conducted by the Multihazard Mitigation Council found that every dollar FEMA awarded for mitigation activities saved about four when it came time to recover.

However, a recent survey by the Independent Agents & Brokers of America found that less than 22 percent of respondents in a nationwide survey considered that they were fully prepared, while nearly 70 percent said they hadn’t made improvements that would protect their homes in the event of a disaster and 41 percent lacked an emergency supply kit.  That’s a cause for concern considering the potential impacts of disasters and the short window of warning most people will have when they happen.

Yet Americans might not be prepared because they don’t see the need for it. The survey showed that more than 80 percent of households had not experienced a disaster. “What we try to also talk about is … we try to bring the threshold of what the perception of a disaster is down, because all disasters are local,” said Darryl Madden, director of FEMA’s Ready campaign.

In this era of increasing social media use, websites that engage residents can play a major role in fostering preparedness. In 2009, Orange County, Calif., and Los Angeles redesigned their Ready campaign websites to make them more visible, engaging and relevant by offering targeted, up-to-date information in an accessible location.

ReadyOC Utilizes Search Engine Optimization

ReadyOC is funded with an Urban Area Security Initiative grant and managed by a steering committee headed by Santa Ana and Anaheim with input from an advisory council of corporate partners.

Orange County Emergency Manager Donna Boston said what makes the new iteration of ReadyOC.org stand out is how the site links from very broad to very narrow information in a simple way and provides focused information.

When the ReadyOC website was initially launched in 2006, it was little more than an online brochure and it couldn’t be updated with real-time information as a disaster unfolded. The new website, launched in the fall of 2009, is updated on a weekly or daily basis. That, along with links to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages, keeps residents engaged. The current site gets 1,200 monthly unique visitors, more than a 100-fold increase over the previous site, according to Rick Miltenberger, senior vice president of Westbound Communications, the company that redesigned and maintains ReadyOC.org.

The new website also pulls information from other sites across the county to populate an events calendar and promotes the county’s AlertOC notification program.

“I know many of my counterparts in other organizations visit it frequently,” Boston said. “I know I plug it a lot more because I trust what is there, and I use it.”

Search engine optimization is another important factor in ReadyOC.org’s success. “One of the things the previous site didn’t do is the platform wasn’t built to be optimized — meaning that if you Googled ‘ReadyOC,’ even though the site existed, it often didn’t come up,” Miltenberger said. “So a huge part of redeveloping this was creating a technical platform that allowed the Internet’s natural searchability to find it. So if you type in ‘Orange County emergency preparedness’ or ‘emergency preparedness in Orange County’ or some of these keywords, you’ll get directed to our site.”

The county’s social media pages also increase the site’s visibility as well as the links between ReadyOC.org and other emergency preparedness resources on the Web. “If you need an emergency preparedness list, everybody has a list,” he said. “Well, we just connect ours to a downloadable form through Ready America. It’s one click. They can get a form that’s just a generic emergency preparedness or a family plan form that they can download on one page on their home computer.”

The site has begun promoting Orange County’s Promise to Prepare campaign to shift the focus from disaster preparedness awareness toward taking steps to increase emergency preparedness. The campaign, which will be officially launched in September 2010, encourages citizens to promise to take at least one action toward increased preparedness and has already drawn more than 340 pledges from residents.

ReadyLA — Localizing Information

ReadyLA takes a different approach to presenting disaster information, cleanly dividing it by disaster type, community, actions to take and where to learn about ongoing disasters — including a live feed of local news.

Los Angeles Emergency Manager James Featherstone said its designers wanted a broad website where visitors could get information tailored to their circumstances. The site achieves this in part through providing information in Spanish and English. An application that allows residents to find information localized to their ZIP code is also a popular application, Featherstone said.

“The big thing in terms of adding specificity to what is initially a very broad website has to do with language capability,” he said. “Ideally if the Emergency Management Department here in L.A. could wave a magic wand, we would have the website in all of the official ballot languages that the ballot is printed in, here in Los Angeles.”

One of the ways to do that is enlist the service of visiting emergency managers from other countries. About a year ago, a visiting emergency manager from South Korea interned with L.A.’s Emergency Management Department and translated the department’s printed materials into Korean.

As increasingly more people rely on websites for information, FEMA’s Madden sees the trend of local Ready campaign sites turning into portals gathering momentum and said the focus needs to move from increasing awareness to encouraging action. “This is going to be an effort that is going to take place; it’s going to be a generational change and that’s the thing we have to look at,” he said. “If you look at any public service awareness campaign — seatbelts, Smokey the Bear for example, even Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the designated driver program — these are campaigns that you measure their success over decades and not necessarily in single years.”