Abstract
Public information officers (PIOs) are responsible for collecting, analyzing, verifying, and communicating risk, crisis, and recovery information to a wide variety of people across the "whole community." Along with the challenges inherent in fulfilling their responsibilities, PIOs now have a new emerging constraint-an enhanced lack of time. The rise, and now arguably dominance, of social media has created the necessity for PIOs to respond to crises in ever shorter amounts of time. An incident that historically a PIO could respond to in an hour must now be addressed within a matter of minutes. The purpose of this exploratory study was to measure to what extent there was consensus among PIOs regarding their perspective of the ideal capability targets for specific emergency communication tasks after notification of an incident. This was a limited study. The findings from this study could be used as a call for regional or nationwide research to develop more robust data. Ultimately, this wider dataset may be used to propose standard capability targets that PIOs can use to develop and measure their own capability targets based on crisis communication plans.