Fernie SAR have now been using the phone dispatch service of VolunteerRescue for six months and it has proved very successful, and today I had the chance to try out the latest integration features of the latest release in a live situation.

At the end of every call out I religiously record details of the call out for historical and statistical reporting and this includes adding all the members that attended with their check in and out times.  Whilst not a lengthy task, that VolunteerRescue makes simpler with the ability to update mutliple members attendance details as a batch, it still added a few minutes to the process.

With the latest integration features of the phone dispatch service as soon as those members that were able to respond replied to the call out they were immediately added to the call out event with their check in time recorded at the time they replied to the call out request.  This meant I was able to complete the details of the event including generating an expense claim to recover our operational costs (yes, VolunteerRescue can also generate expense claims) in about 10 minutes.

An analysis of the costs for Fernie SAR for the last six months using the VolunteerRescue phone dispatch service are

• Total cost for the six months - $28.71 (US) which breaks down to:
  
  
• Total voice minutes - 669 (482 calls, 47 inbound calls, 435 outbound calls)
• Total SMS messages - 960 (225 inbound messages, 735 outbound messages)
• Total cost for voice minutes - $13.11 (US)
• Total cost for SMS messages - $9.60 (US)
• Total cost for a phone number - $6.00 (US)

Fernie SAR members are also finding it very easy to indicate whether they are responding or not due to the numerous methods available to them i.e. the mobile app, with a text message or using the dial pad on their phones.