Message Design Recommendations Based on Risk Communication Research

By Tiffany Gallicano, University of Oregon
(Cross-posted to The PR Post and PR Open Mic)

The swine flu outbreak is an opportunity to talk with students about basic principles of risk communication. Risk communication includes encouraging people to take preventive measures in the face of risk (anything from evacuating before a flood to taking daily vitamins) and helping people cope with risks, such as terrorism. Below are guidelines for risk communication.

1. Think through your word choice. Does the situation warrant the label of “pandemic,” or would “outbreak” be appropriate? You don’t want to scare people unnecessarily or have the opposite problem of leaving people unprepared.

2. Look for aspects of the risk to highlight, depending on whether you want to heighten or ease the sense of risk. If you want to increase public concern about global warming, your message strategy would differ from what you would do if you were developing message points about the swine flu outbreak. Based on Peter Sandman’s research, people feel more comfortable with risks that have the following features:

• People choose their chances of exposure to the risk (e.g., whether to travel to Mexico).
• The risk is naturally created, rather than resulting from human actions.
• The risk is easy to detect, such as an illness that has identifiable symptoms.
• The problem can be eliminated.

3. Acknowledge uncertainty when speculating. For credibility, risk communicators needs to be accurate in their communication, which usually involves using tentative statements. Also, for situations like the swine flu outbreak, Peter Sandman shared the following sound bite with reporters: “Everyone needs to learn how to say, ‘This could be bad, and it’s a good reason to take precautions and prepare’ and ‘This could fizzle out.’ They need to simultaneously say both statements.”

4. Give people something to do to lower their risk. However minimal it might be, give people something to do to reduce their risk (see here and here for examples). When the Washington, D.C., snipers were in my area in 2002, I followed police recommendations featured in The Washington Post to walk briskly in a zig zag pattern. Even though I felt silly walking zig zag, I felt like I had some measure of control in reducing my risk. Also note that people tend to feel more comfortable with risk when they choose to expose themselves to it. Even providing the threat level for air travel gives people some amount of choice in deciding whether the risk is worth the trip. For more information about the importance of this guideline, see Kim Witte’s extended parallel process model.

5. Give frequent updates and repeat core messages through various forms of media. An example of this is CDC’s Twitter account (hat tip to the In Case of Emergency blog). Here is a quote from a communication expert I interviewed for my dissertation: “Nowadays, you have to over-communicate… The information doesn’t filter. We have nine or 10 ways of communicating.”

6. Consider cultural barriers. At the University of Oregon Conference on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Pauline Peters, a lecturer at Harvard University, discussed cultural considerations for HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns in Malawi. Simply telling people to wear condoms to protect themselves would not work well in this environment. Many people there viewed condoms as poisonous and associated condoms with illicit sex. A best practice in developing messages is to partner with representatives of the community to determine message design and delivery.

Interested in teaching a risk communication class?
Feel free to use my course schedule for graduate students as a resource, which includes a list of journal articles and other resources. We are reading two books for the class, which I strongly recommend:

• “Effective Risk Communication: A Message-Centered Approach,” by Timothy L. Sellnow, Robert R. Ulmer, Matthew W. Seeger, and Robert S. Little
• “Trust Us, We’re Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future,” by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.

I reviewed many risk communication books before selecting these two, and I also paid attention to book cost when making these selections. These books as a combination work well; their different approaches can result in rich class discussion.

The most important lesson

– Mihaela Vorvoreanu [cross-posted from PR Connections]

Back when I was a communication graduate student at Purdue, a friend asked me at a party:

So, what is the most important thing you know about communication?

I thought for a second (or two!) then I answered:

Know your audience.

Many years later, I still believe this is the most important lesson you can learn (and practice!) in communication – and of course, the related profession of public relations.

That’s why I’m happy to see posts such as this one by Todd Defren about Shift’s PR process, which starts with a lot of listening.

Carrie Woodward from Brains on Fire visited our class yesterday to talk about the Fiskateers community. It became apparent how much time and effort they put into getting to know their audience, and how they couldn’t have succeeded without extensive research and listening.

Yet, I see so many PR/marketing efforts that seem to be shots in the dark. Let’s just do this. Why? How? Oh, the details don’t matter. Let’s be on Facebook. Let’s be on Twitter.

I was trying to get the point across to my students, that you need to understand your audience, where they are, what they care about, what they talk about, and how… and I used this example:

Imagine you’re all sitting here in this classroom, waiting for PR class to start, but I walk in a random hall down the hallway and start lecturing there.

They laughed at the absurdity of the idea, yet how many companies do exactly that?

I hope my students will remember this lesson, and I hope they’ll be able to get it across to their bosses.

So there, that’s my most important lesson. What’s the most important thing you know about communication and PR?

Quarter System = Endless Registration

-Alisa Agozzino

At the university I work at we are on a quarter system. This means we have 10 weeks of classes every term before our week of finals and then a week of break. The good news is that for those classes that are less than par, it’s over quickly. Bad news is that just when you and the students start to get the hang of the class, it’s over.

The main problem I have with our quarter system is the endless registration. We meet with students 3, sometimes 4, times a year (depending if they chose to take summer quarter). I love see the advisees. I like to find out how their current quarter is treating and if they do have problems, we are able to deal with them before the withdraw deadline. However meeting with these students takes anywhere from a half to a full hour of my time—for two weeks out of every quarter. Combine this with hitting right at midterm time every quarter, it becomes very time consuming and frustrating. I want to give every student the time they rightfully deserve (especially at a private university that stresses student/mentor interaction). Yet with a three course load and research I am ready to pull my hair out.

So as we enter week 5 here in the spring quarter, I sighed aloud today when I arrived at my mailbox with the colored sheet with all my students registration times and pin numbers to register. Here we go again.