GPA
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August 27 2019

Expanding Facebook Local Alerts Within the US

Helping local governments and first responders keep people safe and in-the-know

Update on March 12, 2020: As COVID-19 has spread in the US, local governments have used Facebook to share critical information with their communities about this fast evolving situation. Because of the increasing need to give timely and accurate information to local communities, we’re expanding access to Facebook local alerts to even more municipal governments, state and local emergency response organizations and law enforcement agencies. State and local public health agencies will now also have the ability to push out timely, accurate information to their local communities.

We’ll also provide additional training to partners as they start using local alerts to share best practices for using the tool most effectively.

If you meet this criteria, you can request access to the tool here.

You can learn more about what Facebook is doing in response to COVID -19 in local communities in the US, and around the world, here.

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By Anthea Watson Strong, Product Manager for Today In

Today, we’re announcing that we’ll start to open up access to local alerts — Facebook’s tool to help local governments and first responders keep people in their communities safe and in-the-know — to any eligible Facebook Page in the US by the end of the year.

Since early 2018, we’ve partnered with local authorities across the country to test this new, free tool designed to help them communicate urgent, need-to-know information when it directly affects people in their communities or requires them to take action.

When authorities mark posts as local alerts, we greatly amplify their reach so that people living in an affected community are much more likely to see them. We send notifications to people living in the affected area, and we also show that information on Today In, a new place on Facebook for local news, community information, and conversations between neighbors. You’ll also see the local alert indicator next to that post in News Feed.

How local alerts are used today

Over the past year, information officers from over 350 local governments have used local alerts in a range of everyday emergencies — and some crises — including flash flood warnings, mandatory evacuations, missing people reports, water main breaks, active shooters, road closures, winter storms, extreme temperature warnings, bomb threats and many more.

We’re proud to support the work of local heroes whose job it is to keep their community safe. Recently, Tyler Chandler at the Mt. Juliet Police Department used local alerts to ask people in Tennessee for help locating a 64-year-old man who had gone missing suddenly and was potentially in danger. The community rallied around this effort and they found him within a few hours. Chris Helle at Fulton County ESDA used local alerts after a house exploded in a small town. He explained that although the gas leak had been contained, people should still seek alternate routes and avoid the area as emergency responders worked on the scene. Amanda Carballo at the City of Miami Beach Government used local alerts to warn people living in a specific neighborhood that they had received a credible threat and that they had called in bomb detection K9s to investigate further, out of an “abundance of caution.“ As one resident commented: “Stay safe. Give that dog a treat.” Tangipahoa Parish Government used local alerts during Hurricane Barry to provide the Louisiana community with real-time updates on wind speeds, rainfall projections, and river levels and to distribute sandbags to those who needed them.

Many of our partners have found local alerts to be a useful addition to their toolkit to help keep people safe. Shane Reichardt at RivCoReady, who recently used local alerts to evacuate people during a flood, had this to say:

“People are more connected than ever yet at times it can be harder to reach everyone in the community during emergencies. Local alerts helps the County of Riverside reach more people with our messages. Combined with other alerts we send, Facebook’s local alerts is a great tool to help us deliver vital information to people who need it most.”

According to Austin Ellington at Round Rock, Texas -- City Government, who recently used local alerts to issue a "burn ban:"

"One of the most important aspects of our jobs as local government communicators is the work we do to keep our residents and their families safe. From distributing information related to emergency weather situations, to engaging the public in active missing persons search efforts, Facebook’s local alerts function has become a key part of our agency’s social strategy. Facebook is where our residents are, there’s no questioning that, and local alerts have significantly strengthened our communication efforts via the platform by providing enhanced credibility to our messaging."

Since we started testing local alerts, we’ve invested in making these alerts smarter, allowing partners to specify whether they’re sending a missing person alert, a public safety alert or a weather alert, for example. And we’ve made them more targeted, by giving our partners the ability to select the affected counties, cities, towns or neighborhoods that should receive notifications. This helps us ensure that local authorities reach only the people they need to reach during these urgent situations.

To test that the tool is providing value to people on Facebook, we surveyed about 2,000 people who had seen posts marked as local alerts, and found that 73% reported the posts provided new information they hadn't yet seen elsewhere. 43% reported that they took an action as a result of the information they saw. And 80% reported that posts were at least somewhat valuable.

This feedback, along with the work we’ve done over the past year to improve local alerts, has given us confidence that we should provide access to eligible local governments and first responders everywhere, so they can have another tool in their toolkit to keep people in their communities safe. We’ll start expanding across the US by the end of the year.

How to get local alerts

If you manage a Facebook Page associated with a city or county government, local emergency management or fire department, or local law enforcement in the US and you’d like access to local alerts, please fill out this form. We’ll notify you when we’ve expanded to your region. In the meantime, check out this blog post for more tips for local governments on emergency response and preparedness.

If you want to receive local alerts on Facebook, be sure to follow the Facebook Page(s) of the first responders in your community, or subscribe to receive regular local updates from Today In if you live in one of the cities where we have launched.

During times of crisis, those in affected communities can also visit Crisis Response. There they can see friends who have marked themselves safe, find or give help to those affected, and get the latest information about a crisis from news sources.

Local alerts is just one of the ways that we’re helping connect people with important community information. We’ll have more to share on that soon.