Shifts
Civil protection path
This is the heart of the product, and the reason most associations arrive here: knowing who's on, when, and what happens if someone drops out.
How a shift is born
A shift has a title, a location, a start and an end, and two numbers that matter more than the rest: how many people are needed as a minimum and how many at most. The minimum is what triggers the cover notice; without it an unfilled shift stays unfilled in silence.
The type separates ordinary duty from on-call. That isn't a label: someone on call does not count as busy, so they can be assigned to a real duty in the same hours, and on-call hours don't eat into the weekly hours cap. Someone on call for 48 hours breaks nothing.
Assign, or let them come to you
There are three ways to fill a shift, and they coexist.
By hand: you pick people and assign them. The volunteer gets the offer and answers: accepts, declines, or doesn't answer — and not answering is information too, because you can see it.
With the automatic planner: you give it a period and let it work. The planner looks at declared availability, clashes with other shifts, the hours cap and qualifications, and proposes a rota. Proposes: it assigns nothing on its own. You see the list and decide what to keep.
With "count me in": unfilled shifts appear in the volunteers' app, and whoever wants to steps forward. You accept or you don't. It's the approach that works best in large groups, because it flips the effort: instead of phoning ten people, you let three come to you.
When someone can no longer make it
A swap is requested from the volunteer's own page and lands on a noticeboard: the others see it and someone picks it up. Nobody is left uncovered because a message got lost in a chat thread.
Cover, before it's too late
The panel at the top of the dashboard doesn't count today's gaps: it looks at the next seven days and tells you how many places are missing and how many people haven't declared availability yet. It's written to make you act now, because an invitation sent today is worth more than a phone call tomorrow morning.
Where to start
Open three or four shifts for next week, leave the minimum at two people, and see what the dashboard says. Then try the planner: you'll know within a minute whether the availability you've collected is enough.