Communicate & Advocate

Risk communications campaigns around heat health are most effective when public health and emergency management officials:

• Identify and analyze the audiences and their needs
• Take a collaborative approach with stakeholders and government organizations
• Set clear goals and objectives that fit budgets and are logically linked to the campaign
• Choose effective communication channels and vehicles
• Develop risk communication products and materials tailored to specific audiences
• Build on existing health communication campaigns (e.g. emergency preparedness, public health)
• Offer programs and services to minimize barriers to action
• Follow critical timelines for effective heat-health
• Take into consideration needs of specific communities (e.g. languages, rural versus urban)
• Use pre-tested, consistent and scientifically sound heat-health messages

Effective communication planning must begin well in advance of hot weather or an extreme heat event to positively influence behavioural change and to help the audience deal with dangerously hot weather. Extreme heat and health communication campaigns generally occur over three phases:

• Before the heat season: awareness campaigns focused on raising the audiences' curiosity about heat-health issues.
• During the heat season: Governments should provide the public with timely, consistent and accurate information to help them make informed decisions and change their behaviour to minimize health risks, such as drinking more water and going to cooling centres during hot weather. Many communities around the world have developed heat alert and response systems that encourage people to take actions to protect their health.
• During an extreme heat event: effective and rapid communication materials emphasizing only 3-7 bits of familiar information that audiences can/should remember.

Multiple, diverse channels and vehicles should be coordinated to distribute heat-health messages and to reinforce them. Partnering and engaging local media is important to establish credibility and ensure dissemination of consistent messages. Messages from mass/broadcast media can often blend into other channels of communication by stimulating discussion, especially if the campaign messages are presented as news rather than advertising (source). Visualizations and multimedia can be a useful tool to communicate heat risks to target audiences. When done well, visual storytelling is an effective way of engaging an audience and ensuring that messaging is easily digestible and memorable.

Risk perceptions and socio-economic factors may prevent people from changing their behaviours in the face of serious risks to health. These challenges include insufficient financial resources for air conditioning, lack of clean water or adequate shelter, inadequate skills and knowledge, limited physical ability, and certain views and beliefs (local preferences, accepted behavioural patterns).  

Risk communication efforts have more chance of influencing behaviour when they are complemented by programs that remove barriers to action and provide opportunities for citizens to adopt coping strategies. For example, providing free bus tickets during extreme heat events will encourage people to go places where they can cool down. Interventions to overcome barriers to action should take into account the existing capacity of communities and partners. They should also address the need of target audiences and be based on service utilization, availability and accessibility of services, and stakeholders' perceptions of audience need (source).  

It is also important to address contradictory messages for the public when extreme heat events happen at the same time as other public health emergencies or events, such as the case in summer 2020 with the coexistence of hot weather and the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelming health services in many countries. If heat health messages are telling people to go to public, air conditioned spaces while outbreak communications are telling people to stay home, confusion will lead to worse health outcomes overall.

Formal evaluation of heat-health communication campaigns are key to improve the impact of communication strategies and messages, and to ensure efforts are cost effective and appropriate for your audience. The evaluation plan should be simple and cost effective, and include the audiences, stakeholders, government and nongovernment organizations involved in developing and participating in the campaign. Engaging these groups and receiving constant feedback will ensure identification of common goals among stakeholders, realistic expectations of the campaign outcomes, and appropriate measurable indicators for use in evaluation.