Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management

Crisis and Emergency Management

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April 2004                                                                            Volume 6 - Number 3

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Marketing What Works: Mitigation “Champions”

George Nuñez

One evening as I pondered on the topic of how mitigation can be marketed to decision makers, I took an informal poll of people in the room. I began by asking what the following items might have in common: smoke detectors, traffic lights, homeowners insurance, first aid and CPR, and seat belts. As expected, the responses varied ranging from “they have nothing in common” to “it seems they have ‘safety’ as a shared trait”. A friend said these were items we do not value until we needed them. When I mentioned the term “mitigation”, the first reactions were puzzled looks that were immediately followed by the question “what’s mitigation?” Once I provided specific disaster related mitigation examples, such as tornado safe rooms and flood control projects, I received a common “why didn’t you say that in the first place” glare.

There are numerous approaches to introduce mitigation efforts to a community which include advertising in the local media, holding community meetings, or utilizing the internet to disseminate information. Another technique is to receive buy-in from our leaders in each of our communities. Politicians, business owners, and civic leaders can serve as “champions” that will support mitigation efforts in their communities through not only in word but also by deed.

“Champions”, due to their elected office, financial means, or predominance, can make or break the implementation of mitigation steps in a community. Mitigation, as the informal survey reinforced, is often misunderstood—even by our “champions.” In order to combat this misconception, marketing of mitigation actions should incorporate the following three considerations:

• Personalized—Projects need to be meaningful to the individual person or community. To make a mitigation project attractive to an individual or community, it needs to be specifically geared to their needs and address their concerns. National initiatives need to be made “local.” Politicians appear to be keener to this point since their primary focus is their particular jurisdiction. As with politics, all disasters (and all related aspects, including mitigation measures) are local.
• Practical, Understood, and Affordable Measures Actions—Money often plays a large role in deciding whether to participate in a mitigation project. No matter how great a mitigation project might be, it needs to remain economical and fiscally reasonable. Most importantly, the actions need to be genuine, down-to-earth and realistic. The focus should not be on how much money a mitigation project is going to cost but on how much money will be saved through implementation of such projects.
• Best Practices—Sharing results of a proven and successful project used elsewhere, can illustrate that mitigation actions are beneficial. For instance, sharing how flood control measures saved lives and property in the neighboring community up river, may assist convincing the neighboring town the usefulness of implementing similar measures.

In today’s post-September 11 era, a massive amount of attention is focused on terrorism. However, champions and their communities need take a holistic approach to preparing for all disasters—man-made or natural. Mitigation “champions” need to accept and take on the challenge of assisting with the creation and implementation of a comprehensive mitigation program. The first item of business is to educate our champions and illustrate that mitigation is part of our everyday lives rather than an obscure or unknown topic.