Promoting Awareness
And Use of the Guide
New technology can put information at your
employees' fingertips, but it cannot make them use it. One goal of your security awareness program
should be to promote awareness and use of the Guide. It needs to be promoted repeatedly
with information on how to access it and what can be found there.
Easy access to the Guide is the first step. Your personnel should not have to
remember instructions on where to find it in their computer. It should be on the their desktop or
on a security home page so that all personnel remember where it is and are
able to open the Guide with no more than two mouse clicks. See Installing
the Guide.
Available means of promotion are discussed
below. After each promotional
activity, measure its success by asking your webmaster to use his or her
website tracking program to measure how many of your personnel actually went
to view the Guide and how much time they spent with the Guide.
Oral Briefings: Availability of the Guide as a source of
additional information should be discussed as a part of all security and
threat awareness briefings. Describe
what is in the Guide. Require
that employees at least look at the Quizzes, which are intended to provide a
summary of principal points in the program. You may also use the Automated Briefing Systems (ABS) to test
employees on what they remember from the briefing.
Automated Security Briefings: Mandatory security or threat awareness updates can
be automated by combining the Guide with the Automated Briefing Systems (ABS). The Guide would then serve as a
database in which briefees or trainees look up information to obtain answers
to an automated set of questions.
In addition to meeting briefing update requirements, this would cause
employees to become familiar with what is in the Guide and how to use it,
which is itself a worthwhile awareness goal.
E-Mail: Some security offices have a capability for sending
simultaneous e-mail messages to everyone on the network. Security awareness e-mail messages
could be sent our periodically with some highlight message from the Guide and
a link to the Guide to obtain further information.
Online Advertising: Because the Guide is available online, you can use
online advertising with a link to the Guide. The effectiveness of this advertising
can be measured with web tracking software that counts the number of hits on
the site prompted by the advertising.
There are two approaches to the advertising
- Commercials (or infomercials) could
occasionally appear automatically on the screen when a user logs on to
the network where the Guide is installed. We have prepared several examples
of such advertising, and these can be found under Online Commercials.
- Smaller banner ads such as are commonly found
on the Internet may be placed on some other frequently accessed site,
such as a site that reports on employee activities or a human resources
site. The ad could have a
teaser message and a link to the Guide.
Newsletters: Organizations that have a security office or
general employee newsletter should include parts of the Guide as articles in
the newsletter. Identify the
Guide as a source of this and other similar information and remind employees
how to access it.
Training Courses: Organizations with in-house training programs
should talk about the Guide and use it in any appropriate courses. In addition to security and
counterintelligence courses, this includes, for example, management courses
that discuss how supervisors should handle problem employees. This will require some coordination between
the security office and your training unit.
Contests: It is possible to develop a quiz, puzzle, or
treasure hunt based on the Guide, with prizes for those who do the best or
complete the task first.
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