Australian emergency services have traditionally measured community engagement, education and awareness activities using a variety of quantitative measures such as the number of brochures delivered and number of hits on a website. Used in isolation, such metrics can skew agency performance, the perceived success of initiatives and interventions, and allocations of resources and funding. Such measures have led to agencies that are reliant on marketing collateral and passive one-way information to make an impact in their communities of practice.

We are transitioning into a paradigm of shared responsibility, building resilience and engagement activities that involve proactively working with communities. It is increasingly evident that these quantitative measures need to be reconciled with qualitative measures that gauge the impact of work with NSW communities and the organisation and community contexts that contribute to their success.

Challenges arise when we measure complex forces in society that are not necessarily interdependent nor easily converted into numbers or consistent between projects, programs, facilitators or communities of interest.

The NSW State Emergency Service is leading a project in partnership with NSW Rural Fire Service and Fire & Rescue NSW to explore how we can address these challenges and enhance the way we measure community engagement activities in the emergency management sector. It aims to: assist agencies to seek to strike a more holistic approach to allocating funding and resources; better evaluate the impact of engagement projects and programs; inspire the practitioners; and improve risk management across preparedness, prevention, response and recovery phases of disasters. This paper will explore some of the common outcomes and a model to measure community engagement education and awareness in the emergency management sector.