Quick Start Guide Natural Gas Utilities

SECTION 02 : BUILDING YOUR PROGRAM

Who

Key Audiences & Languages The most critical element for the development of an effective Public Safety Communications Program is understanding the audience. For any particular safety topic, the audience may be as general as the entire population that lives, works, or congregates in an area, or as specific as people working in a single profession. When identifying audiences, it is important to consider both your program goals and the opportunity to provide safety education as a public service to the community, even if that means sharing your utility safety message with those beyond your customer base. The work done to identify your goals in the previous section should set your program on the right track toward identifying target audiences and any important subsets of those audiences. Risk information, safety standards, past incidents and claims, industry data, and best practices—among other items—should all be used to form a full picture of possible audiences. Once the audience has been identified, the message has to be presented in a manner that is appropriate and effective for the members of that group. Because most risk areas or safety topics will have multiple audiences, different materials will need to be developed for various groups.