Inclement Weather & Emergency Shelters

When a freeze warning or heat advisory hits, you don't have weeks to configure software. You have hours.

Warming shelter set up in a community gymnasium with cots and intake table

Key Features

Load every site from a spreadsheet, against a template you download

Overnight hours that run past midnight, set per day of the week

Bed status one at a time or a whole room at once

Bed nights recorded per night, for sites that reopen each evening

Walk-up intake on a public form, with no account and no login

A first name and a gender is enough — everything else optional

A bed request queue triaged Emergency, High, Normal or Low

HMIS export for the night-by-night emergency shelter project type

How It Works

Stand the site up before the advisory

Overflow cots in a gymnasium, cots in a church hall, mats in a library meeting room. Load your sites from a spreadsheet — name, program, facility type, capacity, operating hours, address — against a template you download, and any row that fails comes back with the reason. Hours are set per day and can run past midnight, which is what an 8pm-to-7am warming site is. Beds are marked available, occupied, in maintenance or out of order, one at a time or a whole room at once. Set it up in October, and the site is standing when the first hard freeze lands in January.

Take people in at the door

People arriving at a warming station at 9pm aren't filling out a twelve-field form. Publish an intake form to its own web address and share it as a link, or embed it in the host church's own site with a line of script. Anyone can fill it in with no account and no login, and the person signs the release themselves on their own phone. Intake asks for a first name and a gender; date of birth, SSN, address, phone, email and ID are all optional, because the person in front of you may not have any of them. Check a whole household in as one action, so a family is not split at the door. The line keeps moving, and a public submission arrives pending for someone on your team to approve or merge into an existing record.

Work the queue when the beds run out

Bed requests record how the person reached you — walk-in, phone call, referral, self-referral, transfer — and sit in a queue triaged Emergency, High, Normal or Low, so the order reflects urgency, not arrival. Beds flagged as emergency beds can be assigned past a site's stated capacity, up to 20% of it. Requests age out of the queue on a timer set by their priority. Bed availability is shared with your partner organizations, so a site that fills has somewhere to send the next person. Every change to capacity, every bed status, and every assignment carries the name of the person who made it.

Count the night, and stand the site down after

Bed nights are recorded per night for sites that reopen each evening, which is the number your funders and city partners ask for once the weather clears. Seasonal totals come out of the work itself, not a reconstruction from sign-in sheets in February. Export to HMIS under the night-by-night emergency shelter project type, so a seasonal site carries the same reporting obligation as the rest of your CoC. Volunteers can work the door on a role that stops short of full administrator access. And when spring comes you close the site, then open it again next winter without building it twice.

Solution