Shiftboard is a Seattle startup that already has a great story. Shiftboard is a scheduling portal for organizations – scheduling, not calendaring. Basically, Shiftboard provides a regulated marketplace for an organization where employees, contractors and volunteers can schedule their shifts in a self-service way - while still leaving power in the hands of coordinators. Shiftboard has already had early marketplace success with hospital staffing companies and non-profit organizations.
In the hospital case, precisely the right mix of doctors, specialists, nurses, technicians and other staff need to be in precisely the right rooms at precisely the right times 24 hours a day – or lives are lost. Shiftboard solves the complex scheduling problem and greatly reduces the pain felt by the people who are responsible for making sure everyone is in the right place at the right time. Another obvious case is the chain of coffee shops where a large number of part-time employees work irregular hours at a large number of locations and often need to trade shifts.
In the non-profit case, Shiftboard has helped the
Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) schedule thousands of volunteers and staff at several locations over a few weeks for show times around the clock while maintaining strict permissions about who can, say, work the ticket windows and cash registers. Shiftboard has already seen a lot of organic growth in the film festival world, and is also used by the
Seattle-based public radio station KEXP for its events.
