We need your help to close a $300,000 budget gap and keep Watch Duty going.
We accomplished a lot in 2023:
1) We expanded coverage to the entire Western US. We added 10 new states – a 750% increase in area covered.
2) The Watch Duty app was downloaded by more than 1 million people. During peak fire season, 350,000 people used Watch Duty daily.
3) Our volunteer team grew from 31 to 121 and full-time staff from 1 to 7. These volunteers are at the heart of Watch Duty and make our service work. We also monitored more fires than ever before, 12,270 in 2023 to be exact.
4) First responders rely on Watch Duty. We work with many agencies to provide more information to first responders and emergency managers.
Today we’re announcing our member benefits program. Membership is a great way to support a nonprofit and ensures Watch Duty will always be free for all and devoid of advertising. As a thank you for becoming a member, we’re giving you access to three new member-only features.
We are thrilled to announce that Watch Duty is now available throughout the Western United States!
We have been recruiting new volunteers and building software all winter in anticipation of this momentous occasion. Our software engineers have been hard at work strengthening our systems to handle more geographic areas and the increase in usage. We’ve recruited more radio scanners in more places — retired firefighters, dispatchers, and first responders, experienced fire reporters — to interpret what is happening in real-time. Together we are excited to bring our world-class wildfire and disaster monitoring service to more corners of the United States.
In preparation for this year’s fire season we encourage everyone to make sure they have the latest version of our app (2023.5.2 or later), which is available for download on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Thank you for your support. Please help us by letting your friends and relatives in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico know about this big news!
Calling volunteers, we’re expanding outside of California! We’ve already begun onboarding radio scanners and reporters from Oregon, Washington, and Nevada but we still need more to cover the entire American West. watchduty.org/volunteer
As a non-profit organization we rely on volunteers for everything from reporters to software engineering; 60 to be exact. The most critical to our expansion are radio scanners who listen to first responder radio communications and report on the fire as it happens. If this sounds like you or someone you know please send them to our volunteer page at watchduty.org/volunteer.
Or if your skills lay elsewhere such as legal services or software engineering we could really use your help. All of our software and systems are built to help support our radio scanners and reporters so they can hear everything and never miss a radio transmission.
Please refer to our volunteer job board at watchduty.org/volunteer for more information about volunteering and please share this with anyone you think would be a fit.
Happy new year and a heartfelt thank you to all of our supporters, donors, and volunteers who helped us successfully raise $1.35M! This overwhelming support is what drives us to do what we do every day and will fuel us through 2023 and beyond.
With fundraising behind us for the next year we will be putting our heads down to dive deeper into building more features and a better product to help keep us all safe and informed. We have a lot of exciting things coming your way including evacuation maps, shelter locations, tanker tracker, and much more.
On top of that, we are onboarding more reporters not only for California but for surrounding states. Even deeper behind the scenes we are deploying more radio scanners across California to make sure we never miss a first responder’s radio transmission. And fresh out of our skunkworks lab, we now autodetect orders for wildland fire strike teams, heavy equipment, and air support right out of the airwaves!
Our team has always gone above and beyond the call of duty for our community but now with this fresh new funding we are really going to push the envelope of what is possible. You can expect a lot more from us this coming fire season but for now we’ll spare your inboxes and go back to what we do best, building the world-class Emergency Alert System that we deserve.
