The good practice guide.

"An initiative of the National Community Awareness Advisory Group to the National Emergency Management Committee"

Cover subtitle: Community awareness and education in emergency management

This guide has been prepared to assist people and organisations in Australia with planning and carrying out community awareness and education campaigns and projects in emergency management. Implementing successful behaviour change programs requires good research, understanding of your message and the media that will carry it, and most importantly, understanding of the groups you wish to influence, and how you may best support them as they change their behaviour. This publications suggests why some campaigns succeed, some fail, and others produce unexpected results. It provides advice that may help your group's program succeed. Target audiences for this guide include: State Emergency Services; fire authorities; police; human service agencies; local government bodies; Rotary International; Country Women's Association; school parent organisations; resident groups; and any other community organisation that shares a responsibility for, or a commitment to, reducing loss of life, property damage and social, environmental and economic disruption caused by hazards. This guide is not intended as a complete and detailed 'how to' manual to be applied universally. Rather, it sets out principles, directions, plans and ideas that can be modified and adapted to suit local communities in Australia. While the community can be effectively involved across the entire prevention, preparedness, response and recovery spectrum, this guide focuses primarily on pre-event activities. It deals mostly with awareness messages that are less urgent and that must compete with other important community service messages and commercial advertising arriving via many different sources