SafeResponse

Objective: Train responders who can’t step away from their shifts

SafeResponse, based in Franklin, Tennessee, has offered OSHA awareness-level training for first responders since 2002. Its courses cover hazmat, bloodborne pathogens, incident command, confined space and other rescue topics, and newer subjects like lithium-ion battery incidents and opioid overdose response. Fire departments, EMS agencies, police, hospitals, schools, and manufacturing plants all use them.

The people who take these courses work in shifts, and their training has to fit around the job. Their managers have a different problem: proving who on the team is current, and producing a certificate when an inspector asks for one. SafeResponse needed one platform that serves both groups, and a website that sells the courses to individuals, teams, and large organizations.

What Web Ascender Did

We have been SafeResponse’s web and software team since 2016. We build, host, and maintain the training platform and the marketing site that sells it:

• A Ruby on Rails learning platform - courses split into sections and pages, learning checks and final quizzes, and progress saved at every page so learners can stop mid-shift and pick up later on any device
• Subscriptions and billing - Stripe subscriptions with individual, Team, and enterprise plans, plan management, failed-payment recovery, and renewal reminders
• Team accounts - managers add and remove members, see who has finished what, and download certificates for the whole team
• PDF certificates - redesigned certificates with a completion date, score, and unique number, archived so they can be downloaded at any time
• A dedicated site for Ford - we split a separate training site off the same platform for Ford’s plant emergency response teams, with its own reporting fields
• Marketing and email - a new logo and WordPress marketing site launched in 2017, industry pages for fire, police, EMS, healthcare, manufacturing, and education, ActiveCampaign drip campaigns, and Zendesk for support
• New courses - in 2023 we built roughly ten new courses on the platform, including lithium-ion battery incidents, opioid overdose response, and trench, rope, water, machinery, and structural collapse rescue, plus landing pages and new pricing
• A refreshed experience - an updated marketing site and learner dashboard, course catalog, and course player, built around the way responders actually use them
• Hosting and support - Rails and WordPress hosting, Cloudflare, Amazon S3 storage, and ongoing fixes and upgrades

The Outcome

SafeResponse has trained more than 353,000 first responders in 151 countries. Learners can take a course in a browser on a desktop, tablet, or phone and come back to it whenever their shift allows. Team managers can see who is current from one dashboard, and every certificate is ready to download when an inspector asks. Because the platform and the website were built together, a new course gets a page, a price, and a place in the catalog without starting from scratch.