Disaster Responder Intent

The roster is now complete. All six divisions are in hand, so the denominator is no longer a moving number and the starting line is not a guess. Of 32,396 disaster responders, 1,185 have any deployment intent on file and 1,138 have it on their primary GAP.

The failure mode for this campaign is arithmetic, not effort. Every target circulating — 100%, 70%, 50% — is quoted against the full roster, and the full roster includes 15,918 people who have never been assigned to a disaster relief operation and who record intent at a rate of 1.6%. Asking them in 24 days is not a campaign, it is a rounding error with a deadline.

Intent already concentrates in one place: recent deployment. Among the 2,100 people deployed in the last 30 days, 15.3% already have intent recorded — roughly ten times the never-deployed rate. That group did not receive a better email. They are simply the people for whom the question is currently live.

The recommendation is to change the denominator, not the ambition. Publish the target against the last-12-month deployed list of 7,536. Hitting 52% of that list produces 3,887 records, which is 12% of the full roster — a number that survives contact with a briefing and can be defended line by line.

Every figure comes from a single export type — the Volunteer Connection NHQ Disaster Responder Roster — which carries the full responder universe and the intent columns on the same row. Numerator and denominator arrive in one file, so no join is required and no pivot has to be reconciled by hand.

Intent means any of GAP1–GAP3 Intent populated. Primary GAP intent means GAP1 Intent specifically, which is what the campaign actually asks for.

The spread is narrow, and that is the finding

Divisions run from 2.9% to 5.3%. Northeast leads, but leads at five percent — no division has solved this, so there is no internal model to copy and no region to point at as proof the target is reachable. Whatever gets promised has to be built, not borrowed.

Verified against double counting, three ways

• One export per division. Six files, six distinct divisions. A Pacific PDF delivered the same day was deliberately not loaded — Pacific was already covered by its spreadsheet export.
• 32,396 unique member numbers against 32,396 rows. Member Num is unique across the whole national set.
• Zero duplicates dropped by the loader. The deduplication step ran and found nothing to remove.

This is the most useful cut in the data and it holds across all six divisions. Sequence the campaign this way and the early numbers move fastest; ignore it and the campaign spends its 24 days on the population least likely to answer.

Both numbers describe the same 3,887 records. The first is what leadership will ask for; the second is what the campaign will actually work. Publishing both, together, is what keeps the target honest when someone asks why it is not 50%.

Why 2.4 records per region per day is a real plan

There are 47 regions. The target asks each of them for between two and three new intent records a day for 24 days, drawn from a warm list averaging 160 people per region. A GAP supervisor working a 20-name call list converts that in an afternoon. The same target quoted against the full roster asks for 21 records per region per day from a list of 689, most of whom have never deployed.

What the alternatives actually cost

Ranked by share of the region's roster with intent recorded. The right-hand column is the one that matters operationally: the share of each region's recently deployed people who have intent, because that is the list the campaign will actually work. The progress map shows all 47.

Setting The Pace

Need A Named Owner

These twenty plays were first written against the Pacific Division alone. Every number has been recomputed against the complete national roster. Plays that rest on Pacific-only evidence are marked.

Two smaller caveats worth carrying into the briefing

• Multi-region responders are counted once. Zero duplicates were found nationally, so this affects nothing today — but it is the rule, and it matters if rosters are ever re-cut.
• Roster freshness varies. 38% of responders have had their record confirmed within the last year, which means a majority of the contact information behind this campaign is more than twelve months old.

This week's checklist

• Request the 59-column roster layout for all six divisions
• Decide the target: 8% floor, 12% recommended, 16% stretch
• Publish the denominator as the 7,536 deployed in 12 months
• Name an owner for Los Angeles, Tennessee, and North Texas
• Split the 2,291 missing-GAP cleanup into its own sprint
• Confirm whether entry source can be exported
• Stand up the daily by-region record count before launch
• Agree that only a saved primary-GAP record counts

Source. Volunteer Connection NHQ Disaster Responder Roster, one export per division, six of six divisions, runs 2026-08-13 and 2026-08-14. Combine. Concatenate, then deduplicate on Member Num — 32,396 unique values, 0 dropped. Derive. Recency measured against each division's own report-run date. Publish. Aggregate counts and percentages only — no name, email, address, or phone number leaves the private source directory.

Definitions used throughout

Reproducing this

Aggregate tables and the rebuild script live in the private vc-responder-intent repository; the generator scripts live in red-cross-data/tools/. Adding or replacing a division export is a file drop plus bash refresh.sh. Source exports carry volunteer names, addresses, emails, and cell numbers; they are gitignored and stay on local disk.