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White Paper: Duty Allocation for Sailing Clubs

DutyMan spends most of the year doing swaps and reminders, but don't forget the flexible range of allocation tools. Whether you want simple first come, first served , or to restrict members to a particular duty type, or to gather preferences and allocate manually, DutyMan can help.

Most clubs agree there is no escaping the hard work of annual duty allocation. Members, not unreasonably, need to be encouraged to give up their sailing time to help run the club. Some events are more difficult to fill than others, either the freezing cold weekends at the ends of the season, or the warm summer weeks when everyone would prefer to be enjoying themselves. Race teams also need to have the right combination of skills, perhaps age and experience in the race officers and youth and fitness in the safety boats. New members might need to be rostered with old hands to learn the ropes. Parents might wish to be rostered apart to care for children, and crews might wish to be rostered together to minimise disruption to their racing programme.

Any software tool to help allocation must be very flexible in allowing the right balance between self-service, where members pick their own duties, and management control , to make sure that the above considerations are met.

DutyMan offers that range, including:

• Simple volunteering , in which the new roster is posted for members to volunteer. The first member to pick a vacant duty gets it – though important jobs like the race officers can be manually pre-allocated first. This option is potentially the lowest effort for the club officers, but may lead to management problems later if teams are unbalanced or lacking key skills.

• Using Allocation and Optimum Duty Type, but allowing first come, first served within those limits. This publishes a separate roster of New Duties for a pre-defined period, during which members are able to choose their duties - within the duty type the club has assigned to them. The first member to pick a suitable vacant duty gets it, so some risk remains that teams will not be ideal.

• Using Allocation and Optimum Duty Type , to gather members’ preferences and unavailable dates, and then conducting a manual process of allocation. This allows the experience of the club officers to be used to achieve balanced and skilled teams. It allocates from within preferences, so avoiding the risk of members not being available to do the duties assigned to them.

These are the main approaches DutyMan supports, but there is further user defined flexibility within these options. To get a full understanding of how DutyMan could help duty allocation at your club, explore this website and register for a no obligation free trial.