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Communicating with the public is one of the most important aspects of disaster response and recovery planning, yet in the wake of disaster public communications often get overlooked for the sake of getting other essential tasks completed. Make sure you have enough Public Information Officers (PIO) trained and on hand to keep residents and other stakeholders informed during a disaster.

Recruit local communications professionals as PIOs, but ensure you have at least one who is dedicated to your emergency management agency.

• City or town PIOs, and community outreach professionals for city agencies such as the Departments of Conservation or Public Health can provide good backup or secondary PIOs.
• If using resources from the private sector, be aware that they will likely become the primary PIO for their agency if its impacted by the incident; look for professionals who will be fully available in the event of disaster and not wearing another hat.

Include PIOs in every drill and exercise.

• Localities often leave PIOs out of their disaster training; they play an essential function in disaster response and recovery and need to be trained alongside the incident command team to be effectively integrated in a disaster situation.

Assign PIOs clear responsibilities. 

• The Chief PIO should consider creating and distributing an organizational PIO chart each day that assigns duties to specific PIOs responding that day. The chart should include names, roles and contact information.

Look to local high schools and community colleges for help.

• Smaller communities can reach out to school newspaper advisors or journalism programs at local schools and community colleges to help train and advise PIOs.

Get to know the PIOs in your area and in surrounding jurisdictions.

• Build relationships prior to disaster and have a plan in place to call in PIO support from unaffected surrounding jurisdictions during a disaster.

Have a plan in place for Joint Information Center (JIC) ahead of time.

• Make sure surrounding jurisdictions are on-board to work collaboratively out of a JIC before disaster hits; if one jurisdiction works on their own, it makes it difficult for other impacted localities to get their messages out and coordinate with local media.

Consider implementing a social media management service.

• These services, such as Hootsuite, Buffer or Bindr, allow you to post messages on all of your social media accounts at once.