CERT & Volunteer Emergency Response
Activate your volunteers, know who's available, log every training hour, and prove your program's value at grant time. Resgrid gives CERT, MRC, and community response programs professional coordination tools — starting at free.
Free for up to 10 users & units • No contracts • Set up in about 15 minutes
CERT coordinators are usually volunteers themselves, coordinating dozens of neighbors with consumer tools never meant for emergency response.
A storm is coming and your activation notice sits unread in inboxes. You have no idea who saw it, who's available, or who's already deployed with another agency.
Basic training, refreshers, and exercise hours live on paper sign-in sheets. When the grant report or program review comes due, someone spends a weekend reconstructing them.
Zone captains keep their own rosters and phone lists. The program coordinator has no unified picture of membership, skills, or coverage.
Program funding barely covers helmets and vests. Per-user emergency management software is priced for agencies, not all-volunteer programs.
Purpose-built coordination that a volunteer coordinator can run — and that a city emergency manager can trust.
Activate the whole program or a single zone by push notification, SMS, email, and voice call. Members respond with availability — you see live counts, not silence.
Organize by neighborhood, zone, or specialty team with group-level dispatching and messaging. Zone captains manage their people; the coordinator sees everything.
Schedule basic training, refreshers, and exercises with RSVP. Attendance and hours accumulate per member automatically — grant reporting becomes an export, not a project.
Track CERT basic completion, CPR, ham radio licenses, and specialty skills with expiration dates. Know exactly what capabilities your program can field.
During activations, see who's responding and where deployed members are on a live map. Check volunteers in and out of assignments with a full log.
The free tier covers up to 10 users and units forever — real alerting included. Many CERT programs run entirely on it, and paid tiers stay volunteer-budget friendly.
CERT programs typically run on a pile of free consumer apps that cost nothing in dollars and everything in coordination.
What you use today | Examples | Typical cost | Included in Resgrid |
|---|---|---|---|
Email blasts & phone trees | Gmail lists, call-down sheets | No delivery visibility | Multi-channel activations with responses |
Group chat sprawl | GroupMe, WhatsApp, Facebook Groups | Free, but unmanaged | Organized messaging by group & zone |
Sign-up & RSVP tools | SignUpGenius, Doodle, paper sheets | $0–$300 / yr | Calendar with RSVP & attendance |
Roster spreadsheets | Excel, Google Sheets per zone | Perpetually out of date | One roster with groups, roles & skills |
Volunteer hour logs | Paper forms, honor-system emails | Weekend of reconstruction | Automatic event & activity logging |
Most CERT programs spend little on software but pay heavily in volunteer burnout and lost documentation. Resgrid's free tier gives small programs professional tooling at exactly $0 — and stays affordable as you grow.
Volunteer coordinator hours are your scarcest resource — and documented activity is what keeps program funding alive.
to run a small program — free tier
coordinator time saved per month
of training hours captured
to full-program activation
Estimates based on typical volunteer program coordination workloads; individual results depend on program size and activity level.