WEA - Comprehensive Testing of Imminent Threat Public Messages for Mobile Devices

This project sought to determine the optimized message content of imminent threat messages delivered over the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) Service should the length of future WEA messages be expanded from 90 to 280 characters. Previously, the research team conducted interview, focus group, experiment and survey research on the optimized message content of 90-, 140- and 1,380-character messages (Bean et al., 2014).¹

This prior research found that 1,380-character messages appeared to produce optimized interpretation, personalization, and information seeking and sharing outcomes, and would likely yield maximized public protective action-taking behavior. Shorter messages that were 90- and 140-characters appeared less effective at guiding people toward protective action-taking, but these messages were rapidly distributed and quickly reached a large percentage of at-risk populations.