We are not professionals just because we say so.
Today I decided I was going to be a circus act. I took some juggling balls and tried it out. I wasn’t very good with three balls so I started with two. Now let me know, am I truly a circus act? You probably said no. In fact until I get hired by a circus, until I get other circus acts to recognize me as one of them, and until the public come to see me in the circus and applaud my act, I am not a circus act even if I say I am.
It’s the same with emergency management as a profession. We may call ourselves professionals but are we really? We may be well versed in the practice of emergency management – which is more than I can say about my juggling – but until we fulfill those same criteria, we haven’t reached the status of being a true profession. Until all job openings in emergency management are filled by professional emergency managers, we haven’t been fully recognized. Until other associations, like the Association of Police Chiefs and the Association of Fire Chiefs, agree that we are a profession, we haven’t been fully recognized. Until the public sees us as professionals, we haven’t been fully recognized.
So how do we get there?
We’ve come a long way. We have standards, generally accepted principles, higher education, specialized training, legislation, codes of ethics, collegiality, professional association, research and development, and more. We are however, at a turning point where we need to move from getting recognition as professionals from the inside to getting this recognition from the outside.
We need to embark on a major marketing campaign.
According to Blue Ant Media, a privately held, international content producer, distributor and channel operator headquartered in Toronto, three marketing principles are imperative:
Know who you are
Know who you are talking to
Know what you want to say
The students in my crisis communication course will tell you I teach them in Lesson 1 about the messenger, in Lesson 2 about the audience, and in Lesson 3 about the key message.
How can we apply this in marketing the emergency manager’s profession?
First, knowing who we are. Do emergency managers know who they are? When people ask you what you do, what is your answer?
Here’s mine: I’m the 9-1-1 service for emergency responders. When the firefighters, police and paramedics run out of resources, get overwhelmed an emergency, or they are faced with a situation beyond their abilities, they call me.
It may seem a little narrow for some. It doesn’t talk about my work at mitigation, prevention or recovery. It doesn’t detail the resilience building efforts, the community engagement efforts, the corporate training, or the exercises.
But then, when you ask people what a firefighter does they will tell you they put out fires. Rarely will the public talk about the prevention aspect, the building codes, the fire pre-plans, the inspections, the training, the drills, or the public education initiatives. Same goes for police on their crime prevention efforts. Same goes for paramedics who try to get everyone to learn CPR.
If we want to market ourselves better, we need to define ourselves in a way that the public will relate. Being the support to first responder in large emergencies is a simple language people can understand. I sometime call myself a second responder. Fire, police and paramedics are first responders, I’m the second responder. I’m the lifesaver for lifesavers.
I read a lot of books on emergency management. I read many articles about the topic and many times there is a formal definition of an emergency manager and an academic review of the role. That’s fine if you are in the inner circle or you are one of the people truly interested in the field. The general public, however, will never read those books.
This is the reason why I wrote a novel about pandemic instead of writing an academic review of the risk. I called it The Return of the Spanish Lady. Emergency Managers who read it told me that this was a perfect book to explain the role of the emergency manager and the response to a pandemic. Some suggested it should be used as the course material for college and university students. Then, people who were not from the emergency management field read it, and they loved the action, the suspense, and the intensity of the situation. All the while they were learning about emergency management. I continued on with my second book, The Curse of El Nino, expanding on emergency management concepts with some new disasters faced by my fictional community. My third novel in the series was called The Harness of the Riviera and this one presents business continuity to the neophyte.
Why did I do this? Because the public doesn’t know who we are, they don’t know what we do. I teach about the crisis communications gap, a concept that my good friend Jim Stanton introduced me to. Emergency Managers are professionals and we tend to speak in a scientific language. When we do, we quickly lose the interest of the public. They are functioning at a different level; they use an experiential language.
So we need to define ourselves in a language that the public will relate to. Everyone in North America knows what 9-1-1 is. They see the videos and hear the stories of how first responders are sometime faced with insurmountable odds. We need to tell them that we are that second line of defense.
Then comes the second question, who are we talking to. I’ve already hinted at it, the general public is our ultimate audience. This is large however and will take time. While we are doing this we can examine a few more audiences that can actually help us in reaching out to the general public. I am referring to the other professional associations that have an interest in seeing us succeed. I go back to the idea that we are the second responders there to help the first responders. If we can demonstrate to the Association of Fire Chiefs, the Police Chiefs or the Paramedics that we are there to back them up in major situations, we may make some progress in marketing ourselves.
We often talk of the tri-services of fire, police and paramedics but a four-wheeled vehicle is much more stable than a three-wheeled one. Let get added on to the tri-services to create the quad services. Let’s bring added stability to the whole of emergency response.
The other audience I think we need to reach is the HR professionals group. They continue to influence hiring people from the inside who have a bit of experience with ICS to take on the work of professional emergency managers. HR professionals need to be informed on the level of responsibility attached to our profession. They need to understand that there is a lot more at stake than knowing how to delegate tasks during a fire or a bomb threat. We continue to prepare students for the profession, we mentor them, we provide them with all sorts of experiential opportunities, only to see them bumped up by a recently retired first responder who thinks he can do the work. This needs to change but until HR sees it, we will not make much inroad.
So now we know who we are, we know who we have as an audience, but do we know what we want to say?
My key message is simple. The world is a dangerous place but I am there to make it safer.
Whether you believe in climate change or not, there are going to be floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and ice storms. It’s a fact of life and it doesn’t wait for people to accept it.
All of the other factors that influence our work are also there even if people try to ignore them. Epidemics and pandemics are constantly on the horizon. Violence and armed conflict are always creating tensions somewhere in the world. Add to this our aging population making us more vulnerable. Add also our extreme dependency on electronics as a major risk.
Many of those dangers are there every day and people are somewhat aware of them. Why are they not aware of the work that we do to prevent, mitigate, or prepare for those hazards?
We need to take every opportunity to showcase how we have solutions to offer while most just wait for things to happen. Every time a new emergency occurs, we should be out there promoting how we have made it less likely to happen in our community. We need to tell people how we have reduce the risk of this particular incident happening to them. We need to let them know that we are ready to help them if it ever comes our way.
Now that we know who we are, who we want to reach, and what we want to say, we also need to know how we will get our message out. If the only people who follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn are the insiders, the members of the profession, our message is not going anywhere. We need to get out of our zone of comfort and publish in other media. We need to mingle with people in other circles. We need to be where our audience is. Can we publish blogs and articles about our skills in the Firefighters journals, the Policing publications, the Paramedics magazines, or the Human Resources newsletters?
I truly believe this is the next stage in our profession’s development. We all need to be in on this.
With all this said, I think I’ll stick to emergency management, my circus juggling act is really going nowhere.
Alain Normand, EMP
Emergency Management Professional