Increasingly, the way electric and natural gas utilities communicate around storm events, pipeline leaks, and other crises affects their relationships with public officials and regulatory agencies. Developing restorative messaging that communicates safety messages quickly and effectively with the public during these types of disasters is critical to these relationships and to creating a safer community.

Last December, I wrote about our experience—in partnership with a large New York state utility—delivering restorative communication to at-risk third-party contractors in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and I want to elaborate on this with quantitative insights.

Research demonstrates that recipients of safety-based restorative messaging are highly motivated to use the information to protect themselves and others, including their customers. Furthermore, crisis conditions and the media environment make them more receptive to the message. For example, the readership rate among recipients of restorative communications in the wake of Hurricane Sandy had a 45% improvement over the readership-rate of those who received safety communication in a normal working environment.

Based on our recent national survey of at-risk workers, described in my last blog, 79% of stakeholder workers will change their behavior on the job as a result of reading utility safety outreach messaging. When you combine this statistic with the increased readership rate of restorative messaging, it’s clear that strategic communication around storm events, pipeline leaks, and other crises is highly effective and critical to establishing A Culture of Prevention within the community.

Utilities can derive great value from restorative communication, which is demonstrated through prevention-based effectiveness metrics. In addition, given the pressures that most utilities face in today’s highly scrutinized regulatory environment, communication in the wake of catastrophic events needs to be considered as a critical part of every utility’s overall strategic public safety outreach plan.

Last week we were preparing public safety documentation for an upcoming state audit with the Director of Gas Operations at a large IOU in the Northeast when he said, “We are serious about moving beyond public safety awareness to true public safety engagement. We want to make a difference.” State regulators, internal stakeholders, and management want to know about the effectiveness of outreach programs. Therefore the metrics used need to demonstrate that their public safety outreach plan continually improves the safety of the communities they serve.

The challenge is that conventional metrics alone—i.e., the number of presentations delivered to first responders, the number of mailing pieces sent to affected publics along the right-of-way, the number of dig safe packets mailed to excavators—don’t demonstrate effectiveness, they typically demonstrate activity. When the intention of a public safety outreach or pipeline public awareness program is focused on public safety engagement—i.e., prevention—reporting metrics in the context of effectiveness with research-based benchmarks is critical.

In 2012, we conducted 900 in-depth interviews with at-risk third-party contractors in the United States who had been sent utility safety outreach mailings. The interview results are projectable over the entire population of 2.2 million businesses defined as the highest-risk Standard Industrial Classification codes for electric and natural gas utility-related incidents. The findings provide our customers with a reliable measure of the effectiveness of their public safety outreach program.

Using this research data, public safety managers are now able to report key metrics that demonstrate changed behavior, continuous improvement, and penetration rate. These effectiveness metrics include:

• The number of utility safety mailers actually delivered to at-risk workers
• The number of mailers that reached the appropriate safety contact at each target organization
• The number of workers who recalled receiving the safety outreach
• The number of workers who read the safety outreach materials
• The total minutes workers spent reading the safety materials
• The number of workers who will change their behavior on the job as a result of the safety messages
• The total projected audience of workers who are likely to have seen the safety outreach
• The penetration rate within the total at-risk worker population

As we help utilities prepare for more and more General Rate Cases and audits, it’s clear that conventional metrics are necessary, but in and of themselves they are not enough. Public safety outreach metrics must be viewed in the context of effectiveness, which is achieved through research-based benchmarks.

Hurricane Sandy, and rapid response to the effects of that storm, demonstrated that the delivery of effective public safety messages remains a critical element of utilities’ emergency communication and preparedness process today.

Hurricane Sandy confronted utilities with the enormous task of restoring power safely to the hundreds of thousands of customers it left in the dark. Not only were the needs of their customers overwhelming, the utilities involved were under unrelenting pressure to do repairs quickly and to communicate extensively with the public about them. The infrastructure was severely damaged by flooding and debris from the storm, and repairs needed at commercial and residential sites represented potential safety hazards to contractors and residents.

Beyond system problems, third party contractors doing repairs to private property (plumbers, electricians, and other contractors engaged in the repair of storm damaged furnaces, other appliances, and service connections) were at greater risk than normal.

We executed an immediate public safety outreach campaign on behalf of a large New York utility that reached many thousands of contractors in under a week. Since then, we have conducted interviews with the outreach recipients following the delivery of the safety materials to determine their effectiveness and identify areas of concern and opportunities for improvement. Documentation of all aspects of the safety initiative will be delivered to the utility this month.

The enormity of the destruction from storms has always been a challenge for utilities; increasingly, the way utilities communicate about these events affects their relationships with public officials and regulatory agencies. Today utilities are asked to take greater responsibility for communicating with the public and for ensuring safety inside and outside the home. Delivery of effective public safety messaging, and documentation, are tools to help meet these demands, especially in difficult times like those created by Hurricane Sandy.

Are people at your company looking for ways to increase contractor participation and awareness in your public safety outreach programs?

The best way to get more contractors to take action is through careful segmentation within the larger contractor audience. In doing outreach to 1.1 million at-risk contractors for utilities each year, we’ve seen that contractor-specific segmentation techniques make it possible to produce response rates that are more than ten times the industry average.

Our research indicates that contractors are inundated with communications and can be immune to messaging that isn’t specific to them. Unless the safety message immediately resonates with the individual contractor—speaking to their challenges—it is often ignored.

Utilities that segment their at-risk communications increase customer awareness and engagement—the data confirm this. If you are responsible for communicating public safety it’s beneficial to conduct “Pre-Outreach Research” to

1. narrow and differentiate the contractor audience segments;
2. frame the public safety messaging in a context that matters to each group, and
3. tailor the outreach channels and response-tracking mechanisms to each group.

Audience segmentation and messaging techniques result in increased, measurable participation by contractors. Tangible metrics demonstrate to auditors and management the effectiveness of your public safety outreach program. Ultimately, this leads to more lives saved and more accidents prevented.

Complying with public safety regulations, including RP 1162, is necessary—but not sufficient. A more strategic, comprehensive approach to public safety can better reduce the frequency and severity of incidents.

It’s very easy to fall into a compliance mode, ‘checking the boxes’ for outreach and prevention, and then mobilizing whatever resources are required to respond to, and recover from, periodic incidents, as a cost of doing business. We almost tend to shrug and console ourselves that we couldn’t do anything else— that we did all that was required, all that we could. We can tell ourselves that, but it’s not true.

Committing to a broader approach is the right thing to do because it will translate into fewer injuries and fatalities. It’s also the smart thing to do, because in very short order, fewer injuries and fatalities translate into reduced costs. The costs associated with significant incidents are substantial and this burden is carried, in some combination, by investors and customers alike.

No approach can eliminate all injuries and fatalities. But utilities that are taking steps like these have greatly reduced incidents—and you can too, by:

• Tailoring a strategy that aligns with your utility’s unique organization and its   constituents and service area.
• Implementing an approach that reduces the frequency of accidents and enables the tracking and measurement of those reductions.
• Deploying metrics that provide meaningful feedback that enables you to make your program demonstrably more effective and more efficient over time, and to communicate these successes to stakeholders.

In a comprehensive approach, reducing incidents is completely consistent with reducing costs. Isn’t that just common sense? We work with clients to embed this understanding into normal interactions with the public. Safe business is smart business.

The increased scrutiny by regulators, insurance companies, litigators and others, that many companies are reporting, make the accurate measurement of your public safety effort more important today than ever before. The right kinds of measurements will outline the strategy of your program for internal stakeholders as well as regulators and insurance companies.  These metrics also create sustainable public safety programs.

Understanding what to measure and why are the first steps in determining your public safety outreach tactics. That’s because when you begin with this goal in mind, your program will be more focused and cost-effective; it will be more successful in achieving goals like preventing accidents and mitigating risk; and you’ll be better able to communicate to others how your program results are continuously improving.

What to measure:
Here are several examples of the metrics our customers tell us management and regulators will be requiring:

- List Data

• Who did you reach?
• How accurate is your list?
• How can you verify that the safety information reached the intended recipient?

- Frequency

• How often did you reach your intended audience?
• Why did you reach them that number of times?

- Messaging

• Did the messaging cover RP1162 requirements?
• How many recipients read the safety messages?

- Effectiveness/Incidents

• Why did you send a safety poster?
• Do contractors prefer receiving safety messaging from billboards or direct mail?
• Have you seen a reduction in incidents?

How to measure:
You can employ a variety of tools to answer questions and measure the effectiveness of your program. These options include telephone surveys, email, or direct mail surveys, pre-and post-tests, and focus groups. The choice of appropriate measurement tool(s) is driven by the standards being required.

It is also important to consider whether anecdotal information will suffice or if quantitative data is required. For example, focus groups are very useful in understanding at-risk audience preferences; their results are qualitative. This type of anecdotal information is helpful in shaping your program—but what our customers are asked for time and again by regulators, stakeholders, and insurance companies are quantitative results that are projectable across the entire service area.

Measurement examples:
Here are two examples of survey results from a nationwide study that we are doing to evaluate our programs. These are the types of projectable results that our clients are supplying for management and regulators. They are reported at a confidence level of 95% with a margin of error of +/- 6.3%. It is hard to argue with these kinds of results.

Management and auditors respond positively when your program is framed with these kinds of results, summarized in a dashboard. We recommend to our customers that public safety outreach programs be designed with structured audit-ready documentation that demonstrates continuous improvement effectively and efficiently.

Recently, I gave a presentation at the Utility Public Safety Alliance’s Annual Meeting. The presentation included a discussion of the Pyramid of Prevention introduced in my last post. The Pyramid of Prevention concept and how you use it to develop a public safety outreach program sparked a lot of interest.

Based on this response, I thought it made sense to elaborate on our prevention-based approach by introducing the Strategic Framework for Decision Making, which is a critical tool that helps utilities move their public safety outreach programs “up the pyramid.” The goal of the decision-making framework is for as many activities or components of your public safety plan as possible to land in the effective and efficient area of the quadrant, in the upper left hand corner.

This Framework helps Public Safety Managers deal effectively with various audiences who have different issues, i.e. excavators vs. first responders vs. schools. It is important to use touches productively and appropriately for each audience we want to reach. During the planning process, we help managers identify program elements that produce quality touches in the effective and efficient quadrant.

To help illustrate how to use the Strategic Framework for Decision Making, I have plotted four different types of outreach for one audience, first responders, in the graphic below:

1.    In-Person Presentations
2.    Bill Inserts
3.    Websites
4.    Segmented programs with audience-specific messaging

First responders actively seek out safety training and respond favorably to “train the trainer” programs. For most utilities, first responders represent a relatively small population when compared to other customer groups. Consequently, fewer touches are needed to reach them and have an impact. On the other hand, excavators are a more diverse population and require more frequent touches, as well as more segmented messaging, to have a similar effect.

When designing a public safety program, consider the size, diversity, and interests of your population to determine which type of outreach will deliver high impact, relevant messaging. This is the first step in moving up the framework’s vertical axis as well as the Pyramid of Prevention.

Last week I got a call from a Public Safety Manager at a large dual-commodity utility in the Midwest; they just had an incident where a landscape contractor had dug into one of their underground distribution lines. As we all know this is not uncommon, the unseasonably warm weather nationwide has contractors of all types working outside earlier than usual. The utility wanted to know how they could quickly send utility safety education to all landscape contractors in their service area.

This was one of several similar calls that I have gotten this early spring that reminded me of a trend that we’ve noticed over the years.  When it comes to utility public safety, dig-ins can seem inevitable, but the fact is—incidents are avoidable. When they involve significant damages or injuries utilities often create public safety programs designed specifically around the event. Without a more strategic view utilities sometimes focus their resources on this particular type of loss. Under these circumstances it might be better for a company to look at the overall picture.

Some utilities have taken a more proactive approach, designing programs that reduce potential incidents by increasing the number of effective touches thereby increasing awareness. In doing so, they are on a path to creating a culture of prevention.

This path is best demonstrated by the Pyramid of Prevention which will help to establish a Culture of Prevention in your organization. The key to this model is to raise awareness to the level of retention. There is a science to this based on a combination of quality and quantity of outreach or touches. Focusing on the base of the pyramid—the number of touches—helps to create awareness, establish the practice of safety and ultimately change behavior. Changed behavior is prevention.

This is more than an idea – it’s actually being done and being measured. In shifting to a Culture of Prevention, companies also benefit because their customers feel safer and consequently the company’s image is enhanced and injuries are reduced.