Every September for 23 years, the federal agency that runs disaster response has published a free preparedness campaign. Almost nobody knows it exists. This year's theme is “Americans Stand Ready” — and FEMA's own survey shows exactly why the month is worth paying attention to: people who encounter preparedness information are five times more likely to actually do something.
If you have never heard of National Preparedness Month, you are in the large majority — and that is a little strange, because it is not a marketing campaign or a hashtag someone invented. It is a federal programme, now in its twenty-third year, run by the same agency that shows up after the hurricane.
It started in 2004. After the September 11 attacks, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security concluded that public education was part of emergency management rather than an afterthought to it, and designated September as the month for it. FEMA's Ready Campaign has run it every year since, through four administrations.
The distinction matters. Preparedness advice online is mostly written by people selling something: buckets, filters, courses, memberships. This is the body that manages the federal disaster response, publishing what it thinks households should do, with nothing to sell and no affiliate links. Whatever else you think of FEMA, that is an unusual and useful thing to have — and all of it is free and public domain at ready.gov.
This year's theme, announced on August 11, is “Americans Stand Ready” — framed around self-reliance, protecting the people close to you, and contributing to community resilience. Underneath the theme the campaign asks for four things: make a plan, build a kit, be in the know, and be there for your community. FEMA's own survey data shows how unevenly they land.
In the 2023 National Household Survey on Disaster Preparedness, 48 percent of adults had assembled or updated emergency supplies in the previous year. Thirty-seven percent had made a plan. Thirty-six percent had signed up for alerts and warnings. Fourteen percent had got involved in their community, and just 12 percent had planned with their neighbours — the lowest of all twelve actions the survey tracks.
The shape of that is worth sitting with. The action people take most is the one you can buy. The action people take least is the one that is free, and the one most likely to matter on a street where the power has been out for four days, somebody two doors down has a generator, and somebody else has insulin in a warm fridge.
An awareness month is easy to be cynical about. FEMA runs a National Household Survey on Disaster Preparedness, though, and the 2023 edition contains a finding about information itself that is hard to argue with. In its own words: people with awareness of preparedness information were five times as likely to take at least three of the twelve preparedness actions than people without it.
The raw split is starker than the multiple suggests. Eighty-nine percent of people had read, seen or heard something about getting better prepared in the previous year, and 92 percent of that group had taken at least one of the twelve actions. Of the 11 percent who had encountered nothing, only 38 percent had. That is the entire argument for an awareness month, and it is FEMA's own number: the biggest single predictor of whether a household does anything at all is simply whether the information ever reached them.
Which is the honest reason to pay attention to September. Not because the calendar makes a disaster more likely, but because it is the one month when the good material is pushed at you for free: the FEMA App, the partner toolkit, planning templates, Red Cross training courses, and the Ready Kids material if you have children who would rather learn it as a game than a lecture. Start at ready.gov. Then, when you want to know how many days your own household actually holds and which shortage ends it first, that is what we build.
The storm passes in hours. The aftermath these four actions are meant to carry you through lasts weeks.
MyPlann maps your real preparedness level against every scenario in this brief — and shows you exactly what to address first. Free during early access.
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