Offers

This Playbook looks at how to manage Offers of in-kind support, donations or volunteers.

Use this Playbook to:

  • Record Offers of donations, in-kind support and spontaneous volunteers in the Resources register

  • Enable the Public Offers Form so that people can enter offers themselves

  • Review Offers and allocate to Recovery Cases, Request Tasks and Infrastructure Cases

Positions involved in Offers

  • ERC Support Officer

  • MRM and Deputy MRM

  • MEMO and Deputy MEMO

  • MEMO/MRM Assistant

  • Relief & Recovery Officers and Coordinators

Introduction

Your council may have guidelines for managing donations and offers of assistance during emergencies. These can all be managed with Crisisworks. This playbook covers:

  • Material aid

  • Donations

  • Spontaneous volunteers

  • Accommodation offers

Managing Offers

An offer is a record of a person or organisation offering material or in-kind assistance.

Offers are recorded as Resources in Crisisworks.

  • Decide which offers will be accepted and recorded, and which offers should be diverted or refused.

  • Decide on a process to manage spontaneous volunteers, these can also be recorded in the Offers system

  • Decide on a workflow to manage receipt, review and allocation of offers. See the sample workflow below.

  • Offers are entered into Crisisworks as a Resource (Type=Offer or Volunteer).

  • Use the Assigned field to allocate the Offer to a position to manage, for example the Deputy MRM for all the accommodation needs and offers. Assigning to positions rather than actual people aids in tracking progress between shift changeovers.

  • Use the Workflow Status to indicate if the offer is available, in use, unavailable or closed. Other workflow fields allow for prioritising, assigning, setting of a review date tagging to aid in management.

  • Categories and subcategories of the Form can be customised in the System Look-ups.

More on Modifying Lists using Look-ups

Public Offers Form

Offers can also be entered directly by your community using the Crisisworks Public Offers form. Offers can then be reviewed by your Team and either accepted (or rejected) and then matched to a need identified in a Recovery Case, a Request Task or an Infrastructure Case.

To activate the Public Offers Form:

  • Your System Administrator will need to edit the Event, and tick the Offers Form section under the Public Forms section.

  • The public offer form will be available via https://app.cw.crisisworks.com/yourcouncil/public

  • The Public view of the Offer form doesn’t show any of the Workflow on the right hand side, instead, you are able to customise this text by editing the Public Offer Help Text in your Crisisworks Library.

  • Include a link on your website to the public form, and generate a QR Code to include in flyers and other community messaging to direct people straight to the offers page.

More on Public Offers and Spontaneous Volunteers

More on generating a QR Code for public forms

Players

Make a note below of the people involved in Offers.

Role

Description

People

Municipal Recovery Manager (MRM)

The Municipal Recovery Manager provides overall management of relief and recovery, and will be a point of leadership in the event.

Relief and Recovery Coordinators and Officers

Emergency Operations Centre (EOC)

The EOC is where Council’s emergency operations are coordinated from.

Emergency Operations Team (EOT)

The EOT are staff working out of Council’s EOC

ERC Support Officers

The ERC may receive offers of support or donations of goods at the ERC. Your ERC operating procedures will provide advice on how to manage these.

Workflow

Write below the specific services offered as part of the event before distributing this playbook.

Offer

Workflow Method

WHO… is Coordinating this category of Offer

Accommodation – short and longer term

Enter Offer details in Crisisworks.

Assign Offer to responsible offer

Deputy MRM

Agriculture Supplies

Any offers of Ag supplies to be referred to AgVic <

Volunteers - spontaneous

Enter offer details in Crisisworks; or

Direct the Volunteer to register at…

Accommodation - offsite

Enter Offer details in Crisisworks.

Assign Offer to responsible offer

Donations

Decision: What donations will you receive and which will you refuse?

Enter Offer details in Crisisworks.

Assign Offer to responsible offer

Set up

Offers are recorded as Resources, under the Operations tab. Resources will need to be enabled in your Event.

Brief the team

Keep your Team informed by maintaining a Library record with the latest business rules and workflows. Label it clearly as ‘OFFERS & DONATIONS - rules for xyz Event’ or ‘Process - managing OFFERS and VOLUNTEERS for xyz Event’, and include a link to the Information ID number in the ‘Incident Action Plan’’. This Information entry can be updated as the emergency unfolds and coordination processes are put in place.

Add tags to the item to make it easy to find, (eg offers, processes), assign it to the person or role coordinating Offers and set a review date/time to the record.

Recording an Offer

Create a Resource record, being sure to:

  • Set the Resource Type to Offer or Volunteer

  • Use the categories and sub categories to organise the offers

  • Assign the offer to the role that’s looking after this item

  • Use the Priority feature to highlight items that are urgent etc

  • Use the Review Date to remind the Assignee to follow up on any actions.

  • Use the counters on the main Offers menu to quickly navigate to the items you’re looking for.

Use case: a caravan park owner offers four onsite family cabins for a month at a time for the next three months. Create one Offer based on one cabin for one month, then copy the record to create a separate offer for each cabin for each one month period of time. That way, you will be able to allocate each cabin separately to individual families, it can be marked as ‘in use’ and the details of the family entered for information.

More on Offers

Working with Offers

Some Offers will be general and open ended, for example discounted farm supplies. In this case, the Offer status should be set to Available and the offer communicated to affected residents along with arrangements for accessing the offer.

Other Offers will be one off, for example accommodation. In this case, once you have matched the offer to a need:

  • set the status of the Offer as In Use

  • add a note to the Offer, for example ‘Accommodation has been allocated to the Smith family, see Case #142’.

  • if the Offer becomes available again, edit the Offer record, set the Status back to Available and, again add a note.

Use case: a business offering discounted or free services to affected people. This Offer should be entered as one item with the Status set to Available, and people can be referred directly to the business. Other offers may only have a single use, such as a donated trailer - in this case, the offer can be marked as Closed or Unavailable once it has been allocated.

Declining an offer

Offers entered directly from the public on the public offers form, will come into Crisisworks with a status of ‘Under Review’ so they’re easily identified. If an offer needs to be declined, you may wish to contact the offerer to explain the reasons - this will help to manage community goodwill. Then add a note to the Offers record and set the Status to Closed.

Help from the Knowledge Base

Training and exercises

The following training injects can be used to train users on this playbook.

These should be localised to be realistic

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For

Scenario

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Further reading

PreviousInitial Impact Assessment dataNextTips for Tags

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