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Abstract |
Alerting the population in time of crises and disasters can be challenging depending on the situational context. One key factor for success is to attract people?s attention to the fact that an alert has been issued. Attracting atten¬tion is affected by the alerting channel and its wake-up effect, but also by the time when an alert is being issued. While the reach as a function of daytime has been studied in-depth for some traditional me¬¬dia like TV (see, for example, Held 2001 for data from Germany), little is known about the impact of time on the efficiency of more recently established alerting channels like short messages (SMS) and e-mail. Furthermore, most exis¬ting stu¬dies rather focus on sending the alert to the recipient, rather than analyzing whether the recipient actually read the incoming message, or do not take into account the effect of time on the alert?s impact. How¬ever, this infor¬mation is helpful for practitioners like se¬curi¬ty and safety planners to better prepare for future incidents, and to optimize their communication strate¬gies. In order to close this gap, a field test to analyze how quickly ordinary people actually notice alerts via SMS and e-mail was conducted in the German county of Lippe. In total, 250 participants were acquired for the test through personal contacts, with the help of regional emergency mana¬gement officials, and via snowballing. The latter was important to reduce potential participant bias. People interested in joining the test registered through a website, where they could also select the alert channel(s) of their pre¬feren¬ce. The actual field test was then conducted during fourteen days, in which three test alerts were sent to registered participants. |
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