With Valentine’s Day approaching, it’s the perfect time to help your team practice articulating your preparedness and response efforts as an expression of love. Whether it’s love of friends and family, or love of community and personal interests, most people will be happier and more interested in participating in disaster readiness activities when the context and reason is wrapped around who or what they love.

A simple way to start is to ask each member of your team “who do you love?” Follow up with making sure they do something to increase the preparedness of the people they named. For some people, an easier question to open the discussion is “what do you love to do?” Together you can find ways to weave preparedness into whatever activity they choose!

Tip: To get everyone into the mood, share what you absolutely LOVE about preparedness, safety, and disaster readiness

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Share

February 7th, 2011 | Tags: community, Family, Holiday, love, personal, Preparedness, team, team-building, Teambuilding | Category: 2011, STAT, STAT 5MM | Leave a comment

For many people, the mere mention of disasters and catastrophes triggers immediate mental and/or emotional resistance. To give your preparedness, planning, or response projects a chance to be heard with fully open hearts and minds, consider presenting them with non-disaster contexts and themes.

One of the most valuable non-disaster themes of all is communication! No matter what project you are promoting, remember to: Lead first with all the communication pieces and their benefits, thread important communication tips throughout, share successful communication stories, and have people share with each other their communication strengths and limitations.

Done right, your audience will have far greater appreciation of the importance of communication in successful preparedness and response efforts, and they will leave stronger in their ability to communicate –which is an immediate benefit to your preparedness and response capacity!

Tip: Walk the talk! Demonstrate your personal communication capacity, share your own true “lessons learned” and help everyone to benefit from your successes, struggles, or failures.

Share

February 1st, 2011 | Tags: communication, context, lessons learned, share, team, Teambuilding | Category: 2011, STAT, STAT 5MM | Leave a comment

An excellent way to create a shared vision and instill an aspirational mindset in your team is to create a preparedness and response wish list. At your next preparedness-related meeting, training, or presentation engage your team in creating a wish list. Anything that will help you achieve your shared goals makes a great addition. You can collect suggestions interactively and in person, by soliciting ideas via e-mail, or by simply posting an open list on a bulletin board.

Be sure to include free, easy, and low-cost entries as well as bigger-ticket items. Whether your team has volunteer needs, technology gaps, or would benefit from a one-time donation of services or everyday supplies, having a wish list gets everyone clear and focused in a fun and engaging way.

Tip: Keep your list updated and remember to check in with your community to see if they have leads on acquiring items listed. Be sure to thank contributors and to celebrate any successes! Please let us know if you can help us secure any items from CARD’s wish list!

Share

January 24th, 2011 | Tags: donations, goals, list, suggestion, supplies, team, wish | Category: 2011, STAT, STAT 5MM | Leave a comment

Help your team fully embrace the importance of planning and prioritizing by starting the year with a quality calendar session. Invite everyone on your team to contribute to creating your 2011 preparedness calendar. You’ll want to plot out dates for: trainings, exercises, drills, rotation of supplies, changing batteries, updating contact info, renewing certifications, and dates that could impact your community (holidays, key anniversaries, and major events scheduled by other people). Be sure to include dates for applying for (or reporting on) funding and grants!

If you don’t have one already, consider creating an online calendar. Beyond creating a shared place for your preparedness and planning commitments to exist, online calendars allow everyone to access information while on the road, and you can automatically send reminders. Help everyone to master their own schedules, by creating powerful calendar habits and structures!

Tip: You can create custom calendars for use online and for posting on
bulletin boards by visiting calendar.google.com or timeanddate.com.

Share

January 10th, 2011 | Tags: agency, disaster, emergency preparedness, Preparedness, shared Calendar | Category: 2011, STAT, STAT 5MM | Comments (1)

Help your 2011 preparedness initiatives get off to a great start by creating shared goals with your team, and look to see that they follow the SMARTER guidelines:

Specific – have such clarity that everyone understands the intended outcome

Measurable – pick a measurement that matters and remember: quality often means more than quantity

Achievable  - be sure that the goal can be accomplished with your available resources

Relevant – tie your goals to your primary mission

Time-plotted – create a timeline with milestones and a firm end date

Engaging – meaningfully engage your team and extended community in creating and fulfilling your preparedness goals

Resilient – build in back up people and plans so that your project can withstand the inevitable shifts in funding, personnel turnover, and social trends.

Let’s all be SMARTER about preparedness in 2011!

Tip: Give everyone the SMARTER list and help your team become brilliant at creating, refining and fulfilling on project goals.

Share

January 3rd, 2011 | Tags: goal, guideline, list, mnemonic, plan, Preparedness, team | Category: 2011, STAT, STAT 5MM | Leave a comment

The holidays are filled with opportunities to give your time to make a difference.  Even small amounts of time spent volunteering can make a big difference in the preparedness and safety of your agency, community, or family.

Some ideas:

However much time you have available for volunteering, dedicate at least a small portion to building the safety and resilience of your community!

Tip: Remember to check out your local Volunteer Center for more opportunities to connect.

Share

December 20th, 2010 | Tags: gift, Holiday, holiday preparedness, Preparedness, safety minded gift, time, volunteer | Category: 2010, STAT, STAT 5MM | Leave a comment

Many of us will engage in sharing gifts with colleagues, neighbors, friends, family and teammates at holiday parties. For safety enthusiasts this is a wonderful way to share your passion for preparedness. You can increase the readiness of all participants by incorporating safety sensibilities and helpful items into the event itself.

Some ideas:

• Shiny silver mylar blankets make excellent, reusable table cloths and curtains
• Small LED flashlights can be used by each person to signal when they have a toast, acknowledgment or comment to share
• Wrap presents with bandanas — decorated with colorful Sharpie markers or tied with ribbon — which can then be added to personal go-kits

This is a great way to show the everyday utility and practicality of preparedness supplies and gently thread awareness through your event.

Tip: Take lots of photos and after the party, ask people if they can point out all the ways safety and preparedness items appear in the pictures.

Share

December 13th, 2010 | Tags: emergency preparedness, Holiday, holiday preparedness, Preparedness | Category: 2010, STAT, STAT 5MM | Leave a comment

One of the most valued gifts you can give is to make people aware of the difference they make. Prepare before your next team gathering to give special thanks, appreciation and acknowledgment – publicly and privately – to the people who make preparedness a reality.

Emergency responders are deservedly given all kinds of accolades and praise, so be sure to bring special attention to the champions of the less glamorous tasks of daily safety and preparedness.  Look over your team roster and see what steps people took to forward safety and preparedness. Did they patiently push-through the bureaucracy of a grant, or perhaps do all the scheduling for a class or drill, or were they the consistently smiling and willing “go to” participant?

Seek out the unsung, behind-the-scenes heroes of your preparedness efforts and sing out their praises.

Tip: Beyond helping people to recognize preparedness as a noble and heroic undertaking, have your words also help people to value simply being consistent and persistent in fulfilling on a stated goal.

Share

December 6th, 2010 | Tags: appreciate, communication, Holiday, Preparedness, team | Category: 2010, STAT, STAT 5MM | Leave a comment

Many emergency managers use “Form #1” — a piece of yellow legal paper — if an official form isn’t available. While plain paper is a necessary part of your preparedness tool kit, graph paper and the structure it provides offers extra value.

Use graph paper to:

• Create neater, more legible emergency signage
• Make impromptu floor plans and layouts for rooms
• Count off 140 boxes to make “Tweet sheets” and have your team create Tweets or social media status updates (Remember: 140 characters and spaces total)
• Draw makeshift game boards (checkers, chess, crosswords, etc.) to keep people amused
• Create a matrix (e.g., rows with staff names, columns with required onsite safety protocols)

Stash some graph paper in your emergency response supplies and add to the list of great uses for graph paper!

Tip: You can make custom graph paper using Excel and there are graph paper generators online.

Share

November 29th, 2010 | Tags: excel, Graph Paper, tweet sheets, tweets | Category: 2010, STAT, STAT 5MM | Leave a comment