Holding a Post-Disaster Town Hall Meeting: A Guide for Public Information Officers
Best Practices for Public Information OfficersFor public information officers, a post-disaster town hall meeting requires careful planning and coordination both internally and with external state and federal representatives. Emotions will be running high; community members will demand answers on when they can get back into their homes and when their lives will return to normal. It’s one of the first and most important opportunities for localities to update the community on the status of recovery and set the tone for the entire recovery process.
The Basics
Localities should hold a town hall meeting no later than a week to two weeks after rescue efforts are complete; after this time FEMA will have set up their disaster centers and started accepting applications. Holding the town hall meeting earlier on in the process prevents problems that can arise when FEMA representatives begin communicating with property owners ─ often prior to coordinating their message with the locality.
And for communities participating in HUD’s Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program, it is a legal requirement to hold a public hearing, typically in the form of a town hall meeting.
“One of our most important successes was orchestrating a town hall meeting in the weeks after our rescue efforts were complete,” says Suzonne Cowart, director of finance for the City of Central, which suffered from catastrophic flooding in August 2016. “We decided to hold the town hall meeting to disseminate as much information as we could to the citizens to help them deal with their individual situations.”
Typical presenters at a post-disaster town hall meeting include a top level local official, such as a mayor, chief elected official, city or town manager, or county administrator; incident command; a FEMA and/or HUD representative; and a representative from your regional state emergency management agency.
Notifying the Community
Once you have the date and time for the meeting planned, you will be in charge of notifying the community. Make sure to inform the community on who will be presenting at the meeting, and what representatives will be available to answer individual questions afterwards.
You can use local media outlets and social media to notify the community, but be prepared to send notifications and even to hold the meeting with limited infrastructure and without power. In these situations, residents may still be able to access social media notifications and have the ability to watch live streams.
If your jurisdiction has live streaming equipment, ensure that it’s in place for the meeting. If not, Facebook’s live streaming feature is your best bet and can be implemented on short notice using just a smart phone. You can log into your jurisdiction’s Facebook account on the Facebook iOS or Android App and set the live stream up in just a few minutes. Step-by-step instructions are listed below, or check out this brief tutorial video on how to use Facebook’s live streaming feature. During disaster planning, you may also want to consider subscribing to a live stream service or purchasing your own equipment to stream higher-quality video and embed the video on your locality’s website.
You can also rely on local elected and appointed officials and organizations, such as neighborhood or homeowner associations, to help notify the community on the town hall meeting. You should build relationships with officials and the leaders of these organizations prior to a disaster, and maintain an accurate list of contact information for each organization’s leadership group, officers and board of directors.
Coordinating a Consistent Message
Prior to the town hall meeting, the public information officer will be responsible for reviewing all information that will be discussed by agencies present at the meeting. Although a top level local official will craft the message that’s sent to the community, you will need to ensure that all local and federal agencies involved in the meeting – particularly FEMA and HUD – will be sending a consistent, proactive message. It’s important to show the community that their local leaders have thought through the recovery plan and to provide specific examples of the recovery efforts they have in place.
A great strategy for getting all agencies involved in the meeting on the same page is to facilitate a tabletop exercise. Hold a dry-run of the meeting to give your top level local officials the opportunity to provide feedback to external representatives and craft a consistent, accurate message that will be carried through the entire town hall meeting. The locality’s message should come first and foremost; your local officials know the constituents, and likewise the community is more apt to follow the direction of their local leaders. Ultimately, you want to make sure that FEMA and HUD representatives take on a supportive role, not an adversarial role during the town hall meeting.
“Make sure that the public information officer or a local leader speaks with any FEMA or HUD representatives in advance to ensure their message will support the locality’s approach to recovery,” says Amanda Moody, director of economic development for the City of Central. “External representatives should not be allowed to communicate with constituents in the town hall meeting before this has been done.”
It will also be your responsibility to check the accuracy of the information presented at the meeting and to get approval from the incident commander for any information that will be released at the town hall meeting. Likewise, the local media will typically interview a local representative after the town hall meeting, and you will also need to brief this person before they are interviewed by the media. They will need to know what information is appropriate to share, and also must have the most up-to-date, accurate information. It would be helpful to conduct media training in advance with local representatives who may be called on to speak with the media during a disaster.
After the Town Hall Meeting
After the town hall meeting, you’ll need to disseminate the information discussed at the meeting to the local media, and to a wide range of other stakeholders – homeowners, local businesses, volunteer groups like the American Red Cross (ARC) and religious groups. This should summarize the meeting’s key points, including the overall recovery efforts being taken by the government, and also actions that community members, local businesses and volunteer groups can take. This will generally be formatted as a press release and given to local media outlets, but take advantage of other communications platforms like the locality’s website, blogs, mass emails and text messages.
It’s important to keep the media up-to-date on the current situation to prevent them from seeking other, less reliable sources and sending a message at odds with the information discussed at the town hall meeting. Yet be aware that even the most carefully crafted messages can be skewed by the media.
If the media sends an incorrect message, you should take immediate action to get the correct information out to the community. The implications of misinformation can have major consequences if the media reports that something such as drinking water is safe when it actually is not. If this happens, reach out to all local media outlets to correct the message as soon as possible, and depending on the severity of the mistake, use a reverse-911 system, your contacts with local organizations, local television, newspapers and radio stations, and even flyers if needed.
Public information officers should also coordinate with the top level local official who led the town hall meeting to send weekly or bi-weekly updates to the media and all stakeholders after the meeting. This keeps the community up to speed on the status of recovery, and can serve as a platform to answer frequently asked questions throughout the entire recovery process.
Live Streaming from a Smart Phone
- Log into the Facebook App using your locality’s Facebook account information.
- Once on the home screen, tap, “What’s on your mind,” at the top of your News Feed.
- Next, click on “live stream” from the drop-down menu that appears. Your camera will open, but the video will not yet be streaming live.
- You can adjust who can view the video by clicking “only me.” A menu of privacy settings will then appear. You should click “public” to make it available to the largest amount of community members. Click “done” in the top right hand corner to return to the camera.
- You can also include a description of your video by clicking where it says “Describe your live video…” and simply typing your description. This is a good place to include that a FEMA and/or HUD representative will be speaking about the application process.
- You will then ensure your phone’s camera is facing in the right direction by clicking on the icon in the top right hand corner with two arrows.
- To begin streaming, hit the blue “Go Live” button in the bottom right hand corner. Note that while broadcasting, you can notify users to submit their questions by commenting on the video. The comments will appear at the bottom of the screen, and you can then read these questions to the presenters to have them address viewers’ concerns.
- When the meeting is over, click “Finish” to end the broadcast. The video will stay on your locality’s Facebook page as a video post, allowing the community to view the post after live stream ends.
Click here for a brief tutorial video on how to use Facebook’s live streaming future.
In August 2016, over seven trillion gallons of rain fell in a 48-hour period in the city of Central, Louisiana, swallowing the city – and most of southern Louisiana – in more than four feet of water, and in some places up to six feet. The City of Central, which is located at the confluence of the Amite and Comite rivers, was still recovering from flash flooding that had occurred earlier in the year when the August flooding occurred.
More than 5,000 homes in the city sustained “substantial damage,” meaning that the damage was estimated to cost 50 percent or more of the structure’s value to repair. In total, 25,000 of the 27,000 residents of Central were impacted by the flood. While homeowners took a big hit from the storm, fewer than 50 businesses in Central were damaged.
“If this happens again, we’ll have to rethink everything,” says Kathi Cowen, IBTS/Central’s Floodplain Manager and GIS Specialist. “We hope we won’t see something of this scale again in our lifetimes.”
At the time of the flood, 75 percent of Central was in the 100-year flood zone, where there is a 1 percent chance of flooding each year and residents are required to carry private flood insurance. Yet 90 percent of the houses and businesses in the city sustained flood damage as a result of the August 2016 flooding, extrapolating the costs of damage due to the nearly 2,000 homes that did not have and were not required to have flood insurance.
The flood was the fourth most costly and the largest since Hurricane Sandy. In total, the flood damaged 55,000 southern Louisiana homes, and had initial damage costs estimated at $8.7 billion.