Safety of its members is the primary responsibility of a rescue organisation and one way to achieve safety is to ensure each members' training is up to date whether this be through in house training or external training providers; either way it is important that members are aware of the training they are eligible for and the dates and times of the training sessions.

Distributing information on training is therefore very important but different members have differing technical abilities and often just one method of information distribution is insufficient, fortunately VolunteerRescue provides more than one way to publish information to your members.

Calendars

Example calendar menu

VolunteerRescue provides a calendar screen that shows details of all events, in fact VolunteerRescue allows you to create multiple calendars allowing you to define calendars that just show specific event types, for example a training calendar that just shows training event types.

You can also create a calendar that subscribes to a published calendar allowing events from external calendars to be included on your groups calendar, ideal if you use external training providers and you want to include their training schedule on your calendar.

FYI, you can also create calendars that show details of when to do items are due, when members are unavailable and when assets are unavailable.

With all this information the calendar page can suddenly become very busy so VolunteerRescue allows you to specify which calendars you want to display even allowing you to create menu options that limit the calendar display to a subset of the defined calendars.

Selecting which calendars to include

Whilst very powerful this still relies on your members checking your organisations online calendar which in todays modern world of many online systems may not be at the forefront of each members mind.  What you need is a proactive rather than reactive solution and again VolunteerRescue provides options for this.

Subscribe to a calendar

How many times have you been in a meeting and when arranging the date and time of the next meeting everybody round the table pulls out their phone and checks their availability using a calendar on their phone.  I guess many of you and therefore ideally the events on your organisations' VolunteerRescue calendar would also be included on a members' own personal calendar.  Using the export option button above the calendar will display a link that a member can use in their personal calendar to subscribe to your organisations calendar. Any events over the next 60 days that the member has permissions to view will be included on their personal calendar.

Popup window containing calendar subscription link

E-mail

Meeting request shown in gmail

If you do not want to enable the export feature of calendars or perhaps for those members who do not know how to subscribe to external calendars you can use e-mail.

When e-mailing members details of an event, a file is embedded in the e-mail that contains a meeting request which most calendar software will recognise and provide an option when displaying the e-mail to add the meeting request to the members' personal calendar.

Summary

Whether using calendar subscription or e-mail both options enable members to include details of your organisations events on their personal calendar which will hopefully help your members to avoid clashes in arrangements by proactively distributing event details removing the need for your members to regularly connect to your VolunteerRescue service to check the calendar; in fact it may actually act as a reminder for your members to connect to your site for further information.