Our annual membership requirements include training (across all disciplines), some safety requirements (e.g. mask fit testing) and 20% incident attendance. That 20% … 1 in 5 calls … can be hard on some responders. Calls drop at odd hours of the day or night irrespective of life, family and work schedules.

We offer “Incident Credits” as incentives / rewards for above and beyond shifts (Christmas & New Year shifts … one credit atop any calls), for critical conditions patrols in hot/dry summer months, and for other worthwhile causes.

To apply an incident credit:

• Create an incident, allow D4H to set its unique identifier (we don’t typically use the CAD identifier, but we might add an “a” or “b” to the end of one to associate it with that incident, e.g. stayed overnight to monitor the fire.)
• Tag the incident as “Incident Credit” (we create that tag)
• Invite *only* those getting the credit (do NOT invite the rest of the team, hence a bonus for those present, and no negative for others not present)
• Approve the incident as/when your process dictates.

D4H shows “percentage attendance” which mathematically is a numerator of “number of attended incidents” over a denominator of “number of invited incidents”. Adding an “incident credit” is technically not fully 1 incident attendance since it adds to both the numerator and the denominator, but it is a valuable credit (and close enough.)

We tag incident credits as such, mainly so we can pull them out from regular incidents to get accurate response numbers for (say) grant applications.

D4H does a good job of maintaining individual response numbers, and incident credits allow us to give credit while keeping things simple (the presented numbers correct) for the volunteer.