Know who you can field before someone asks.
Scheduling & Operations turns your training records into an operational picture. It runs the calendar your members already need — drills, trainings, meetings, activations — and pairs it with what each person is qualified to do and when they say they're around. The answer to "who can we send Saturday?" stops being a phone tree.
A week of your organization, by rating and by day.
Rows are the qualifications you actually award. Columns are the seven days of whatever week you're planning. Every number is a person who holds that rating and says they're available that day — and every number opens.
| Rating | Sun9/20 | Mon9/21 | Tue9/22 | Wed9/23 | Thu9/24 | Fri9/25 | Sat9/26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Any rating — all available members | 9 | 4 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 14 |
| Incident Command (ICS-300) | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 4 |
| Ground Search Team Member | 5 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 9 |
| Shelter Operations | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 6 |
| Emergency Communications | 3 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 5 |
| Damage Assessment | 1 | — | 1 | 1 | — | 1 | 3 |
The readiness board. Illustrative data; the real board is built from your own ratings, units, and members.
- Dana Whitfield Station 2 8 AM – 6 PMusual Saturday
- Marcus Reyes Station 2 All dayusual Saturday
- Priya Anand Station 5 9 AM – 3 PMset for this date
- Tom Ochoa Station 5 8 AM – 6 PMusual Saturday
Clicking the Saturday “6” opens the people behind it.
How to read it
- The top row is your whole roster. Everyone available that day, regardless of what they hold. It's the "do we have bodies at all?" line.
- Each rating you publish gets its own row. No configuration — award a new rating in The Academy and it appears here. Organizations that run on a flat roster still get the top row and the drill-downs.
- Every count opens. Names, the hours each person gave for that specific day, and their contact details, so the board hands off straight to a phone call or a callout.
What keeps it honest
- Filter to a unit, a team, or one rating — and the filter stays put as you page through weeks, so comparing next month to this one is two clicks, not two setups.
- Coverage is stated, not implied. The header says how many of your active members have posted anything at all. A board built on nine people out of sixty should say so.
- Stale availability is flagged. Anyone who hasn't confirmed in 90 days is counted separately and nudged by email to re-confirm. Old data is the way a readiness picture lies to you; this is the guard against it.
The member's calendar is the control.
A readiness board is only as good as the availability behind it, and volunteers will not maintain a form — so the module doesn't ask them to. Members see their own month, events and all, and change a day by tapping it.
One member's month. Green is availability, the hatch is a day they marked off, and the solid chips are the org's events — all in the same grid.
Set the usual week once
Most volunteers are predictable: Tuesday evenings and Saturdays. A member sets that pattern one time, and it fills the calendar and the readiness board forever after. Nothing else is required of them.
Then change the days that are different
A nine-day trip is one drag across the calendar. An extra Thursday because a shift got covered is one tap. The specific day always wins over the pattern, so a member never has to reason about which rule applies — and never sees the word “exception.”
Every change saves immediately and offers Undo, so a member can try something without needing to be told what it will do first.
Easy to Update. Just tap
Tapping the same day cycles it. There is no mode to enter and no form to submit.
Not available
A plain day. You're not counted, which is the default until you say otherwise.
Available all day
One tap. You're in the board's Thursday column from this moment on.
Tap again for hours
A small From/To picker opens on the cell itself. Cancel leaves the day as all-day.
Available, with a window
Your hours travel with you into the board, so an officer sees them before calling.
What availability is — and isn't
Availability is a planning hint, not a commitment. A member who marked themselves off can still be paged and can still answer yes; a member who said they're free is not on the hook. Treating it as a promise is how a readiness tool loses the volunteers who feed it.
Which is also why freshness is tracked out loud. Availability that hasn't been confirmed in 90 days is marked stale on the board and the member gets one email asking whether it's still right — answerable with a single click.
Bring the readiness board to your next planning meeting.
We'll set it up against your ratings and your units so you're looking at your own organization, not a demo.