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How long should an emergency message be to prove effective?

Feb 27, 2015

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Short 90- and 140- character wireless emergency alert messages delivered over mobile devices are “substantially less effective” than much longer messages to spur people to take action in case of a hazard, a recent study concluded.

According to Fierce Homeland Security, the study from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START – a research and education center based at the University of Maryland – also found that rearranging the content within the message and including a map showing an area that’s been affected by a hazard could also improve public responses.

Among the findings, the study said that shorter messages were less effective “at helping people overcome their pre-conceived perceptions about different hazards and likely would be less effective at guiding people to take protective actions appropriate to the risk they face in an actual event.”

While, obviously, shorter messages didn’t have as much information as a message 1,380 characters in length, the study said that 90-character messages can be rapidly disseminated and reach affected populations faster.

The study also found that rearranging the content in a 90-character message could improve public response. Currently, such messages follow a certain order: hazard, location, time, guidance and source. Rearranging them by source, guidance, hazard, location and time improved outcomes, but the arrangement may be different for 140-character and 1,380-character messages.

Another finding was that including a high-information map – as opposed to a low-information one – in 90-character messages had a “statistically significant and positive effect” on outcomes. It “improved most participants’ understanding, belief and risk personalization across all message lengths,” the study said.

It should also be noted that length is critical to a mass communication. “Brevity is the soul of wit”, but even more importantly, it is emergency related. Mass communication alerts have typically been sent for extreme weather bulletins or when there is a dangerous situation taking place at a specific location, such as a particular building on a campus or business site.

Now that alerts have become broader in scope, it is becoming more common to see alerts about event notification; to alert of upcoming, canceled, or even impromptu events attendance alerts; in an educational setting, this can alert parents and faculty when a student is tardy or absent; road closure: for maintenance reasons or some emergency. The applications are endless.