Council takes out national award for disaster campaign
Date published: 18 November 2019
Townsville City Council’s Are You Disaster Ready Campaign has been recognised with a national award.
The Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) held their National Award Dinner last week with Council being awarded the winner of the Crisis Communication category.
Townsville Mayor Jenny Hill said it is fantastic to have the hard work of the Council staff recognised at a national level.
“Our disaster campaign is a massive program that runs over an entire year and is worked on by many of our staff,” Cr Hill said.
“This campaign is all about protecting our community and making sure every single resident knows what steps they can take to keep themselves safe in the case of a disaster.
“The staff delivering this campaign were heavily involved during the unprecedented monsoon and their efforts were crucial in getting messaging out to our community.
“It is a credit to every single person that helped deliver the campaign to have it recognised at the PRIA awards this week and that other Councils are looking to it as a model for their own campaigns.”
The campaign included public safety messaging, running the Townsville Disaster Dashboard, community events like Disaster Ready Day and more.
The Are You Disaster Ready Campaign was also recognised with the Award for Excellence in the Best Collaboration campaign category at the Local Government Communication Conference earlier this week.
Stats and figures:
- Townsville Disaster Information FB had a 33% increase in followers over 12 months
- The Townsville Disaster Dashboard was viewed over 4 million times with an average time on the page of over 5 minutes
- 544 surveys completed at Cyclone Sunday (now Disaster Ready Day) showed most people used the website, Facebook and radio to get information during a disaster
