Welcome to the Public Affairs Officer (PAO) Training Academy!
The State Defense Force Unit Public Affairs Representative (SDF UPARS) training will be conducted at the April 2018 Executive Committee Meeting of the State Guard Association of the United States (SGAUS) Mid-Year Meeting in Fort Worth, Texas on 21 April. Following up on the first UPAR Training at the 2017 SGAUS Annual Conference, the training curriculum will be led by PAOs MAJ (IN) Terry Heiftetz, SPC (NY) Zachary Perkins, and PFC (GA) Andreas Alsdorf.
Modeled after SGAUS’s Chaplain and Judge Advocate General (JAG) trainings, the SDF UPARs training prepares unit PAOs to tell the SDF story: the who, what, when where, and why of the SDF mission. The need for PAOs in the 21st century is increasingly important due to the manner in which news and information is distributed through the internet. Many Americans do not know that SDFs exist, let alone what their mission is, and the task of the PAO is to get the word out to this external constituency. In addition, information about the SDF mission, SDF training, and SDF successes needs to be distributed quickly and accurately to SDF forces so that morale remains high and mission success is more likely to be achieved. Finally, PAO personnel are critical to making sure that SDF forces are appropriately informed of their commander’s intent so that mission success and training occurs according to design.
The contemporary PAO is also trained in the National Incident Management System (NIMS) role of Public Information Officer (PIO). This on-site role in the Incident Command System (ICS) is the “action” role of the PAO in the disaster relief environment. In order to successfully fulfill this role the contemporary PAO will be NIMS qualified in all PIO duties, and will hold appropriate NIMS certifications for these duties in the ICS.
The Executive Board UPAR training will be held on 21 April, and will include the opportunity for earning a 1.0 Continuing Education Unit (CEU) for a $30 fee (CEU participation is optional). Training will include preparation prior to the Fort Worth training (2 hours), and an 8-hour training in Fort Worth. The focus of the 2018 training will be social media; additional topics are basic news writing, photography, photo captioning, operational security, and a completed article for publication in the SDF Times. Point of Contact (POC) for the training is CPT (TN) Steve Estes (tnsg.hhc.pao@tnstateguard.org ). Requirements for attendance are SGAUS membership and conference registration.
Login for more information: https://sgaus.org/sgaus -academy/pao-academy/
Other PAO Academy Instruction Material and References
Please follow the Web link below to access the Dropbox repository for the other PAO Academy training and reference materials. You’ll be able to download the documents, presentations or videos from the repository to your local PC, Laptop, or Tablet.
Click here to access the other PAO Instructional and Reference Materials
If you don’t have a Dropbox account to access the repository via the link above, you can sign up for a free basic account at the Web site by clicking below:
Access Dropbox for a free account
All inquiries should be directed to:
CPT(TN) Steven Estes| Chair, PAO Committee | tnsg.hhc.pao@tnstateguard.org
