Volunteer-led nonprofit Team Rubicon responds to natural disasters and humanitarian crises around the world, including our recent involvement in the US response to COVID-19. 

Over the course of 30 days, we answered 250 requests for assistance and set up 169 work sites in 41 different states. In Santa Clara, California, we put together and are running a 250-bed decompression station that serves as overflow for the area’s 10 hospitals and medical centers. In North Carolina, we’ve partnered with Atrium Health to provide mobile testing for COVID-19, and we’ve completed well over 1,000 tests so far. We’ve also deployed personnel in the Navajo Nation to assist with its COVID-19 response.

In the midst of all this, we’ve responded to six different tornadoes across the southeast United States, and we’ve partnered with Feeding America to help its 200 affiliate agencies address food insecurity in vulnerable communities.

As we’ve planned our response to this upsurge in need for our services, through the lens of COVID-19, it’s highlighted the importance of taking care of our volunteers and employees. We need to make sure that we not only take care of the communities we serve in times of disaster, but also the communities our volunteers will return to after their work with us. We built our volunteer-management system on Microsoft Dynamics 365, and with it, we’ve been able to better address our volunteer deployments. We made it our obligation not to deploy people from a known spread zone to a non-spread zone, and we’ve used our system to restrict movement in that fashion. We’ve also used it to identify volunteers with special skills and deploy them to COVID-19 hot zones that sorely need their help.

We’ve even been able to do some predictive analysis of where aid will likely be needed and step in to offer assistance. By combining infection rate data with other information sources like potential weather events and social vulnerability, we can see which areas are bending the curve and which aren’t there yet. We can find gaps in aid and fill them.

With 120,000 volunteers, we’re managing huge quantities of information. During the registration process, volunteers share any special skills and certifications, along with previous military experience. Using Dynamics 365, it’s easy for us to continually build up the story of each individual and determine where their unique qualities would be most useful. They can complete courses based on their desire to learn new skills or bolster the skills they already have, and we log all that information in Dynamics 365. This creates incredible opportunities for that individual, and ultimately it helps us harness their capabilities and capacities to better respond to disasters and help people around the world.