Pretesting your content
It is important to pre-test your disaster risk communication plans or content with your target audience. This will help to indicate whether content will engage audiences, and enable you to make any necessary adjustments.
Contents of Disaster Risk Communication Hub
- Introduction
- Process
- Principles
- The four phases of disaster risk communication
- Understand
- Plan
- Do
- IMPACTFUL communication
- Novel collaborations
- Media interviews on disaster risk
- Misinformation and disinformation
- Pretesting your content (you are here)
- The importance of feedback loops
- Scenario
- Resources
- Improve
- Main publications
- Case studies
- Further resources
Pretesting does not need to be expensive. Once you have produced the content, whether that is key points for alerts or a radio show, share it with audience members to get their views.
Key areas to get feedback on include the target audience’s view on a programme’s script, storylines, characters, presenters, logo, theme tune and other production elements, that can help to enhance engagement and coherence. Pre-testing can identify areas of low engagement, or confusion, or potentially culturally insensitivity, which can be addressed before the content is distributed. This can help produce content that can better resonate and align with your audiences’ preferences.
| Pre-testing element | Sample questions |
|---|---|
| Engagement | What made you want to watch/listen to this content? What put you off? What did you not like? |
| Comprehension | Was the content easy to understand? Was anything hard to understand/confusing? |
| Acceptance | Is there anything you find offensive or inappropriate? |
| Relevance | How relevant is this content to your life? How are the people/characters represented similar or different from you? |
| Motivation | What does this content make you want to do? How likely are you to do that? Why? |
| Improvement | What new information did you learn? What information do you think is missing? What do you need to know more about? |
Involve people with disabilities in designing and testing media content
Disasters have a disproportionate impact on people with disabilities, yet a recent UNDRR survey highlights limited progress in disability inclusion over the past 10 years.
Over half of survey participants (56%) reported not being aware of, or not having access to, disaster risk information in accessible formats.
You can make your disaster risk communication inclusive of people with disabilities – and other marginalised or overlooked groups – by including them in your content design and testing processes.