The alert bar, the emergency page and phone alerts

Residents can hear about an emergency from many places at once: a phone alert, a text from an opt-in service, the radio, a social media post or a banner on your website. Each channel has a job, an owner and limits. When everyone knows them, the channels reinforce each other. When nobody does, residents get three different stories.

Push and pull

Push channels reach people who were not looking: phone alerts, texts, emails, sirens, broadcast interruptions.

Pull channels wait for people to come: your website, its alert bar, the emergency page, a recorded phone line.

Push channels are short and loud. Pull channels hold the detail. A good emergency message uses push to get attention and pull to give instructions, and every push message links to the emergency page.

Your website's alert bar

The alert bar appears at the top of every page on your site. It reaches only people who visit, so it does not warn anyone. Its job is to catch visitors who came for something else, such as paying a bill, and send them to the emergency page.

• One line: what is happening and a link to the emergency page.
• Posted by your web team, under your approval path.
• Removed when the emergency ends.

Running a Public Website Day to Day covers the alert bar's everyday rules in its sixth lesson.

The emergency page

The page holds the detail: status, instructions, places, times, languages and contacts. It is the one place every other channel points to. Lessons 1 to 3 of this course cover it.

Opt-in alert services

Many counties and cities run a mass notification service that residents sign up for, sold by companies such as Everbridge, CodeRED, Rave and others. They send texts, emails and voice calls to subscribers, often by neighborhood.

• Reach: only people who signed up, or whose landline is in a purchased directory.
• Who sends: usually the county emergency management office, sometimes a city, school district or utility.
• Your part: know who runs it for your community, link to its sign-up page from your emergency page and match its wording.

Alerts through FEMA's IPAWS

The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) is FEMA's national system for local alerting. Authorized alerting authorities write alerts in compatible software, and IPAWS authenticates and delivers them through:

• Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) to compatible phones in a targeted area, whether or not the owner signed up,
• the Emergency Alert System (EAS) on radio and television,
• NOAA Weather Radio,
• other pathways, such as state and local systems.

Only alerting authorities that have gone through FEMA's process can send them. In many places that is the county or state emergency management agency, not the town.

FCC rules set limits that shape WEA messages. Alerting authorities write a 90-character message for older networks and may add a version of up to 360 characters for newer ones. Carriers must support Spanish-language alerts and embedded web addresses and phone numbers. That web address is often your emergency page.

Social media and local media

Social posts copy the emergency page's headline and link to it. Local radio and television often read your page on air, so keep it quotable. Send updates to your local media list when the page changes.

Write down who owns each channel

For your community, find out and record:

• who can post the website alert bar and emergency page,
• who runs the opt-in alert service, and how to ask them to send,
• who your IPAWS alerting authority is, if any, and how to reach them,
• who posts to each social media account,
• who calls local media.

Ask your county emergency manager for the alert service and IPAWS answers. They may be the same office.