Preparedness Month ideas, resources and practical tools for public safety agencies
1. Review the Risks Your Community Is Preparing For
Preparedness campaigns work best when they reflect the hazards residents actually face.
That may mean hurricanes and coastal flooding in one jurisdiction, wildfires in another, or tornadoes, hazardous-material incidents, winter weather, extreme heat and power outages elsewhere.
FEMA’s National Preparedness System provides a framework for communities to identify risks, determine capability requirements, build and sustain capabilities, plan, exercise and continuously improve preparedness.
September is a good opportunity to revisit a few questions:
- Have our highest-priority hazards changed?
- Which neighborhoods may need additional assistance during an evacuation or prolonged outage?
- Are language, transportation, disability, age and other community characteristics reflected in our plans?
- Are preparedness campaigns focused on the risks residents are most likely to experience?
A Useful Tool: FEMA’s RAPT
The FEMA Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT) is a free GIS-based resource that lets emergency management professionals examine Census data alongside infrastructure, hazards, historical disasters, estimated hazard frequency and weather information.
The U.S. Census Bureau Emergency Management Hub provides additional resources, including Community Resilience Estimates, My Community Explorer and OnTheMap for Emergency Management. My Community Explorer can help agencies understand potential disaster impacts on people, businesses and the economy, while OnTheMap provides population and workforce information for areas affected by disasters.
The goal isn’t simply to collect more data. It’s to turn that information into practical decisions about planning, evacuation, alerting and community outreach.
2. Test the Alerts Residents Will Actually Receive
Testing your emergency plan should also mean testing how you’ll reach and inform the public. FEMA provides an Alert and Warning / IPAWS Exercise Starter Kit specifically for jurisdictions that want to exercise public alerts and warnings. It includes both notice and no-notice scenarios and provides planning considerations and discussion questions around public information and warning, operational coordination and operational communication.
That makes September a good time to ask: When was the last time our agency exercised the actual alerting process—not just the incident response?
An exercise can include drafting an alert, selecting the affected geographic area, choosing the appropriate alert type or event code, reviewing approval procedures, confirming authorized alert originators and evaluating whether the final message clearly communicates the hazard and protective action.
Practice is also an area where FEMA’s latest household research shows room for improvement. In its 2024 National Household Survey, 27% of adults ages 18–59 reported participating in an emergency drill, compared with just 7% of adults age 60 and older.
Exercises therefore shouldn’t stop at the EOC door. Preparedness Month can also be an opportunity to encourage schools, healthcare organizations, businesses, senior communities and other local partners to practice what they would do when an emergency warning arrives.
For agencies looking for a streamlined way to access IPAWS and Wireless Emergency Alerts, Hyper-Reach also offers an IPAWS-only plan for authorized public safety agencies.
3. Review Emergency Message Templates Before You Need Them
The middle of an incident is not the ideal time to decide how an evacuation warning, shelter-in-place message or flash-flood alert should be written. Pre-approved message templates can help you communicate more quickly while still leaving room for incident-specific information.
Agencies may want to review templates for common local hazards such as wildfires, tornadoes, flash floods, hazardous-material incidents, evacuation warnings and orders, shelter-in-place events, missing-person alerts, boil-water notices or prolonged utility disruptions.
A useful review question is: Does every template clearly tell the recipient what is happening, where it is happening and what they should do next?
This is also a good time to review terminology. Terms such as Warning, Order, and Shelter in Place should communicate a clearly understood level of urgency and expected action.
If you’re reviewing your agency’s messages this September, these two resources can help:
- Crafting Effective Emergency Messages: Templates & Best Practices — practical guidance and examples for structuring emergency messages.
- How to Write Clear Emergency Alerts: Wording, Format & Terminology — a closer look at alert wording, Warning vs. Order, terminology and consistency across jurisdictions.
For wildfire-prone jurisdictions, you may also find our guide to writing clear wildfire evacuation alerts useful. It applies FEMA’s wildfire evacuation guidance to practical alert-writing decisions.
4. Turn Preparedness Month Into an Alert-Enrollment and Outreach Campaign
One of the easiest preparedness actions residents can take is also one of the most valuable for local emergency managers: Make sure people know how to receive local emergency alerts.
FEMA’s research provides a strong reason to keep communicating about preparedness. As the infographic above shows, people who encountered preparedness information were five times more likely to take at least three preparedness actions than people who did not, according to FEMA’s 2024 National Preparedness Report using 2023 household survey data.
So Preparedness Month outreach doesn’t have to be just another September communications campaign.
Give residents something specific to do. Agencies can use the month to promote:
- emergency-alert registration;
- social posts explaining local hazards;
- QR codes at community events;
- signup links on municipal websites;
- multilingual preparedness materials;
- outreach through schools, libraries and community organizations;
- partnerships with disability, senior and faith-based organizations;
- explanations of local alerts, Wireless Emergency Alerts and other warning channels.
Want to Increase Community Alert Sign-Ups?
We’ve put together a practical Increase Community Alert Sign-Ups Guide with ideas public safety agencies can use to promote their alert system and encourage more residents to register.
Fill out our short contact form and we’ll send you a copy.
5. Strengthen Regional and Community Partnerships
Preparedness is rarely a single-agency responsibility. Emergency managers routinely depend on fire, law enforcement, EMS, public works, public health, utilities, schools, hospitals, nonprofits, businesses, volunteer organizations and neighboring jurisdictions.
September can therefore be a good time to:
- meet with neighboring emergency management agencies;
- compare evacuation and alert terminology;
- review mutual-aid communication procedures;
- confirm points of contact with utilities and critical infrastructure;
- engage community and faith-based organizations;
- invite partner organizations into exercises;
- identify organizations that can help reach harder-to-contact populations.
And there is still plenty of opportunity for community preparedness education. FEMA’s 2024 National Household Survey found that 58% of adults ages 18–59 and 52% of adults age 60+ reported having an emergency plan.
Emergency managers can’t create individual plans for residents, but they can work through trusted local partners to make preparedness information easier to find, understand and act on.
