Our Mission

Our Mission

Our mission is to help individuals, households, and organizations prepare for and withstand all kinds of emergencies and disasters through step-by-step education, planning and tracking tools, and encouraging real-life action.

Our vision at Ready IRL is to help individuals and households get started from the ground up, to orient them in the realm of emergency preparedness, and to help them take real life action to prepare. We aim to reduce the overwhelming tsunami of emergency preparedness resources into understandable bite size chunks. We want to provide our tools without the heavy-handed scare tactics of businesses selling expensive readiness commodities and without the annoyingly ad heavy content found all over the Internet. We seek to personalize your readiness journey and help you prepare for the personal, household, and community, disasters that concern you the most.

Want to Help?

We welcome your help! Contribute feedback, ideas, suggestions, and readiness stories. We could also use help from designers, those wanting to help with research, or those seeking to become readiness advocates in their community. See the Contact Us page to reach out to us.

Our Philosophy

Our philosophy is to keep emergency preparedness simple. With just a handful of actions you can be well on your way to being Ready In Real Life. 

Emphasize Security and Privacy

We believe in security and privacy. Data you share with us deserves bank-level security and absolute privacy. We will do everything in our power to protect your data and will only share it with your explicit permission. See more on this topic below and in our Privacy & Terms of Use.

Focus on Actionable Steps

It starts with covering the minimum, bare necessities of spirit, food, water, and shelter. Even then, those actions are a starting point to build momentum, rather than a place to get stuck. It's the difference between preparing food for 72 hours versus gathering a year's worth of food for your household. Getting started only requires setting aside a few items in your pantry and building the stockpile over time.

From there, we believe in simple steps and simple actions, each carrying you forward in your preparedness journey. We want you to see your progress and then look back and see how far you've come. 

Keep Content Simple

When it comes to education and training, we believe in keeping it simple. There were over 80 possible disaster topics that we found just in our first draft! However, we broke those emergencies into 6 general categories to make them easier to understand and explore. 

Our website menus are designed to be small (and to stay small!), compared to the overwhelming array of options on many sites. Individual pages will help you to continue drilling down into the topics you want to learn about instead of blasting you with an overwhelming fire hose of content. 

We want to guide you through all that educational content too, if you want to go further than exploring and begin formal training. We do this in the same bite-sized, step-by-step way that we use to help you with your preparedness.

Minimize Ads and Marketing Content

We believe in minimizing ads, newsletters, and other nagging marketing content. 

We want our site to be free of third-party ads, because we know that online ad systems are annoying, obnoxious, distracting, and frequently privacy-invasive. Have you ever been to a site where the content you want is buried in so many ads and so much superfluous content that you can't even find it? As an example, trying searching the web for a chocolate chip cookie recipe and click on three different results. The first three we clicked on had so much extra content that they all needed a "Jump to Recipe" button at the top of the page to get to the actual recipe!

We minimize newsletters and other nagging email marketing content, and only send them if you explicitly sign up for them, and even then no more often than quarterly. We all get enough email that we really don't need any more, and we really don't like those fake marketing emails that are pretending to be "about your account" when most of the content is trying to sell you something. 

Remember, there is a place for email notifications such as an annual reminder that you have an account with us. Otherwise, our emails and notifications are intended to help you take the next step in your readiness journey, but only at a frequency that you set and that you have control over. And because we know life is busy, if we notice you not taking action on our notifications we'll slowly reduce their frequency rather than allow them to continue being another piece of noise in your life. Come back when you have time to continue!

Privacy and Security

We understand that information about you and your household is highly sensitive. We value your privacy and will never sell your information or share it with third parties without your explicit permission. We place a significant emphasis on the security and confidentiality of your data and in some cases explicitly decline to collect it. We want you to be in complete control of your information and to offer the option to withhold anything you don't feel comfortable sharing. Check out our Privacy & Terms of Use page for more details.