In the last module, we spent some time talking about what disasters and crises are and talking a little bit about some of the phases of the disaster cycle, those kinds of things. But another important part of emergency management and thinking about crisis communication is actually planning. If you recall in the previous module, we talked about the four phases at the emergency management cycle. One of those phases was preparedness. Well, an important preparedness activity is planning. In this module and in the next few videos, we're going to talk a little bit more about planning and about the planning process. In this video, I'm going to go over with you what the steps for the planning process are. Now, these steps are outlined by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, in their community planning guide 101 or CPG 101, which is aimed at more communities, government entities. But really this is guidance that's important for planning overall. Now, they talk about the planning process as an overall approach to planning, so that's what they're laying out with these steps. But they are a little bit flexible. While you should follow these process guidelines, they are flexible and adaptable to meet community needs. Depending on your resources, what you have available, and what your needs are for the community, you can adapt these a little bit to make sense for where you're coming from and the situation you're working in. When we talk about the steps of the planning process outlined by FEMA, the first step is to develop a collaborative planning team. There are a collection of individuals that will be working on this planning process, so it's important early on to identify who those partners, who those collaborators will be as you move forward. But you're not just going to be working with those individuals. As we'll talk about extensively later in this module, you're also going to be engaging the whole community in this planning process. You're going to be engaging a lot more other individuals as you go through developing this plan. You want to both identify the core team of folks you're working with, as well as thinking about how you're going to be engaging this larger group of people. The second step outlined by FEMA is to understand the situation. Get a sense of what you're working with. One of those pieces is to understand the threats and hazards that you're facing in your community, or if you're coming at this from an organizational level that your organization might be dealing with. What hazards do you face? We talked about those in the last module. What kinds of risks might you be dealing with? What kinds of assessments do you need to make about risk? What kinds of activities you need to engage in to start understanding what risks and what threats you face that you need to plan for? The third step is to determine goals and objectives. Here is where you're going to talk about your operational priorities that you want to make sure it can continue during a crisis. You also want to set goals and objectives in your planning process at this stage as well. The fourth step is plan development. Here you're going to develop and cope with the course of action for how you want to move for the plan. The different things that you want to do, that you want to plan for, the kinds of activities that you're anticipating doing, you want to identify resources as well. So it's not just about what you're going to do, but what's available to you. You can think about that in terms of financial or personnel resources, other material tangible resources. Think about what you have available to you to facilitate not only your planning process, but to the kinds of activities that you're planning for. Then you also want to identify information and intelligence needs, both for planning purpose and what will you need when the activity you're planning for is actually taking place. The fifth step in this process is plan preparation, review, and approval. As you can probably get a sense of here, this is probably something that you'll be going through a few times. Where you're writing the plan, you're reviewing the plan, and you're getting approval. In some cases, that might be a single person who needs to review and approve the plan in terms of getting that final approval. In other cases, it might need to go through a lot of different levels of review and approval. That again, is going to depend on your specific circumstances, whether you're working for an agency, for a government entity, whether you're working for an organization, whether you're doing this from much smaller group, what that process looks like will vary. But here you can think about developing the documents and going through that review and approval process. Finally, the sixth step in this planning process is implementation and maintenance. FEMA here talks about exercising the plan. That's where you actually then go through and practice what you say you're going to do in this plan. Here, you would review, and revise, and maintain the plan. Doing whatever you need to adjust the plan as you're going along to update it as you're moving forward. Why I'm I going over this? Why are we talking about these steps? Well, on the one hand, planning can be a bit of an overwhelming process, especially if you're new to it. Understanding this process will make sure that you're engaging the folks that you need to engage in this process, as well as thinking about the kinds of things that you need to consider while planning. This is a way to really help you organize your thinking and organizing your activity as you're engaging in the planning process. The connection of risk communication here is twofold. One, risk communication is likely one of many things that are being considered in this planning process. If you're considering the larger presidentially response activity you're planning for other kinds of activity, crisis risk communication is going to be a piece of that overall planning structure. Similarly, you may be developing specifically a crisis risk communication plan, in which case you would be going through the same kind of process to develop a plan specific to that kind of activity. Now that we've discussed the steps of the planning process, in the next video, we're going to talk a little bit more about the priorities and the principles that should be guiding this planning process.
