Bring Back Your Community Faster

Expedite Disaster Recovery & Protect Your People

We help local and state governments rebuild faster and stronger by providing the data they need to make quicker decisions and by protecting their citizens from wrongdoers.

Government’s Challenge After a Disaster

When a disaster strikes your area, as a leader you are left with considerable challenges. How do you protect and educate your constituents? What data do you have for better decision-making? How can you reduce fraud? How can you be a more effective leader and get your community reopened sooner? So much is out of your control, and you’re pulled in hundreds of directions. The data you need to make good leadership decisions is either non-existent or delayed. The around-the-clock hours and media coverage for you and your team take an emotional and physical toll. Your people want to come home as soon as possible, and businesses need to reopen, and you want to keep tax dollars local. You have volunteers ready to serve but coordination of who is where and what effect they are having is not always clear. You want to help everyone, and you feel helpless. As the recovery begins, the disaster after the disaster creeps in with scammers, storm-chasers, and fraudsters. These bad actors take advantage of the chaos caused by gaps between the government, homeowners, builders, insurers, volunteers, and other service providers. In Hurricane Katrina alone, it is estimated that $6B of $100B of federal rebuilding aid ended up lost to fraud.

A Better Way

BuildSOS developed a simple platform to protect and strengthen communities by utilizing technology to verify people are here to help, not hurt. Our platform leverages verified participants, innovative workflows, and data capture to create outcomes centered around transparency, predictability, authenticity, and efficiency. BuildSOS verifies the identity and credentials of volunteers and contractors, keeping the fraudulent actors out of the process, and providing transparency in resilience and rebuilding processes.
  • Verify the “Good” Volunteers – Volunteers register to confirm their identity and which organizations they are involved with. Geolocating technology facilitates identity checkpoints, so that data is captured on who is where at any given time. This supports better resource utilization and proof of efforts, and discourages fraudulent actors posing as volunteers.
  • Educate to Verify Contractors – Through public service announcements before and after the disaster, BuildSOS supports community education to “card their contractors” to verify their contractor is legitimate, thus weeding out the fraudulent contractors.
  • Reducing Everyone’s Risk – Verifying contractors and volunteers reduces the risk for everyone involved in disaster recovery, saving time and money, reducing community and personal anxiety, and helping the community recover more quickly.

BuildSOS Reduces Conflict between Homeowners & Contractors

Every party involved in disaster recovery, including the homeowner’s mortgage company, has safeguards to protect them and reduce their risk. These safeguards cause more time delays and drive up the cost for everyone involved. We created a structure that provides transparency after every step to expedite the rebuilding process because it reduces the risk for every party involved, the homeowner, contractor, insurance company, and mortgage company. From the beginning, they build trust knowing they are working with a verified contractor and that trust continues throughout the project with our software because everyone is following the same, transparent process, and each step is documented along the way, with key data being captured. BuildSOS technology, repairs are completed more efficiently, the experience for everyone goes more smoothly, and the community gets back to normal more quickly, with people in their homes and business open.

How BuildSOS Got Started

A small group of contractors, many of whom sit on Louisiana’s contractor licensing boards and are leaders of area home builder associations, teamed together after seeing the unnecessary challenges and fraud in the rebuilding efforts from the 2016 floods which impacted Southeast Louisiana. They wanted to help their neighbors get back into their homes faster so their communities could be together again.

The main reason rebuilding efforts took so long and cost so much was a lack of coordination, clear processes, data sharing, and trust.

Delays and costs increase because the residential construction industry involves many participants who lack common processes. This is further worsened by homeowners uneducated about the rebuilding process. BuildSOS empowers homeowners by giving them the control to identify good and fraudulent contractors through our verification process. We also empower homeowners through education on what to expect when rebuilding and transparency in the process.

Volunteer Verification & Management

Verifying volunteers allows government officials to better protect their communities from wrongdoers and the resources to better coordinate volunteers so they’re not sitting idle. Our volunteer verification process includes:
  • Confirmation of affiliation with non-profit organization(s)
  • Criminal Background Check
Once approved, volunteers are given a virtual ID that law enforcement can easily scan to allow them entry to disaster areas.

Contractor Verification

BuildSOS is not a lead source for contractors. Contractors cover costs to get verified and pay a fee if they choose to use estimating and project management software. Our self-verification process includes:
  • Registered with the Secretary of State
  • State Contractor License
  • Valid Business Insurance
  • Criminal Background Check
  • Business in Good Standing with Secretary of State
BuildSOS does not verify the quality of work a contractor does on every job, that is checked by your local permitting/building code office. However, we educate homeowners on what to look for (and how to build stronger). Our software requires photo documentation of the project’s progress to keep the homeowner and insurance company informed. This transparency leads to a better overall experience and expedites the entire timeline.

Putting This In Place is Easy

Contact us today. Getting started with BuildSOS is easy and we can walk you through the entire process and provide scripts for your PSAs to educate your citizens to “Card Your Contractors” along with playbooks to register and manage your volunteers. Contact us so you’re prepared to help protect your people the next time disaster strikes.