Kim Stephens is an independent emergency management consultant with over a decade of experience in the field. She has a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Texas A&M University. 

She is the lead blogger of iDisaster 2.0 where she writes about the benefits as well as the challenges the emergency management community and other public sector entities might face when employing new information communications technologies before, during and after a crisis.  

Providing innovation to projects, this year she conceptualized, developed and implemented social and multi-media strategy for the District of Columbia Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency’s Hurricane exercise series.  Multimedia included six different social platforms including Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, SMS texting, and a blog site. During the Functional, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter were used in closed systems that allowed only those with access to post content. SMS texting was utilized to push content to every player with a text message on their personal or work cell phones. This allowed our team to reach players with injects, such as weather. During the Table Top Exercise, SMS texting was used to pull information from players: links to a time-sensitive/pertinent questionnaire were sent out to all registered participants. Kim also wrote and produced 8 videos posted to YouTube to simulate the news media’s coverage of the Hurricane. These videos were displayed during both the Table Top and the Functional and provided realism. 

Kim also has extensive experience in both sheltering and exercise design, development and evaluation at both the Federal and the local level and has worked for many years with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Recently, she developed shelter training for the Massachusetts, Western Region Homeland Security Council that was delivered as interactive e-training.