Disaster prevention and response must be seen as a whole, and require the commitment and joint participation of all stakeholders, including communities at risk. This requires, of course, that they have the necessary knowledge, preferably through specific training, that they keep up to date on the subject, and that they compile a list of reliable sources to cover every likely major hazard or every relevant aspect of these hazards. Designing a communication strategy calls for deciding how the subject will be treated, what will be the conceptual and referential framework to be used, which social groups will be the target audience and how they should be approached, when, and through which specific channels. A disaster prevention communication strategy must be based on specific goals, such as how to discourage the building of infrastructure in hazardous places, or how to encourage community organizing. Clearly, the first message would be aimed at decision-makers, a very different audience from the families and informal community leaders that the second message would try to reach.
Campaigns are a basic tool of such a communication strategy.
The planning stage, in turn, involves setting objectives and defining the target audience, the contents, the communication channels to be employed, the resources available, and the feedback and evaluation mechanisms to be used in the latter stages. Print news, for good or ill, enjoys a great deal of credibility, making it ideal for conveying messages that will influence the behavior of people when they are confronted with a disaster. If preventive communication has been reinforced and clarified through repetition and variation, if it is educational, entertaining, and makes readers feel as if their concerns are being taken into account, people will remember the recommendations, the explanations of the phenomenon, and its consequences, even if they have not saved the material, because the combination of the written word and other graphical elements will have been stored in their memories. Millions listen to radio, including those whose illiteracy keeps them beyond the reach of newspapers and magazines. Television shares the advantage of instantaneity and lower educational barriers, but is also more compelling because it appeals to vision as well as hearing.