Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit

Disaster preparedness isn't just about being ready for a fire or earthquake; it’s a nimble, flexible approach to your organization’s day-to-day programs and operations. A natural disaster may never hit your office, but by adopting certain technologies and strategies, you can deepen your nonprofit’s impact and make your work faster and more efficient. The provisions that ease rebuilding your tech infrastructure also let you build an ad-hoc office to carry out your mission in a new place or circumstance. For this reason, we hope that the resources in this toolkit will not only prepare you for a crisis, but deepen your nonprofit’s impact in times of health too.

The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery

The Resilient Organization is a holistic guide to disaster planning and recovery. This book is intended both for organizations striving to be better prepared for an emergency and for organizations striving to rebuild and maintain operations after a disaster.

The Resilient Organization is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. If you adapt all or part of this guide for a particular organization type, country, or disaster, we’d love to see it and, if applicable, publish it through our various channels. Send us an email at btc@techsoup.org.

Download the Guide

TechSoup Disaster Recovery Guide (620 KB PDF)

TechSoup Disaster Recovery Guide (1 MB DOC)

Post-Impact Operations Analysis Worksheets (43 KB XLS)  (These customizable Excel worksheets complement the example worksheets in Chapter 9 of the guide.)

We invite readers and organizations to share their own disaster planning and response resources using the tsdp tag in Delicious. For more information on Delicious, read Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging

Adaptations and Localizations

Chinese Translation Project

TechSoup Taiwan has organized a volunteer project to translate and localize The Resilient Organization in Chinese. Share this resource with Chinese-speaking colleagues or join the localization effort yourself.

Additional Resources

TechSoup Talks! Webinars

Disaster Planning: What Organizations Need to Know to Protect Their Tech

In this online seminar, we discuss the ins and outs of getting your organization in tip-top shape before a disaster or crisis happens. We review best practices, tips, and resources for developing and implementing a disaster-preparedness plan at your organization that will help you not only when a crisis hits, but every day.

Disaster Planning: Backup, Backup, Backup!

Join TechSoup as we review various approaches to backup and help you implement a solution that readies your organization for any disaster — however big or small — that might come your way.

General Guides

Communications, Protection, Readiness: NPower’s Nonprofit Guide to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (3.1 MB PDF)

This guide, courtesy of NPower, outlines the key steps for developing and implementing a thorough response plan before a disaster strikes.

Disaster Planning, Emergency Preparedness, and Business Continuity

“How do you know it’s a disaster? When critical services aren’t happening.” The Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York offers this guide to documenting key business processes to ensure continuity during a disaster.

WESTPAS Workshop Documents

This packet of resources, used by the Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service for their training workshops, can help public libraries and archives document emergency procedures and perform impact analysis and triage after a disaster.

Unified Communications

Unified Communications Options for Nonprofits

In a disaster scenario, it’s essential that fast communication not require employees’ physical presence in the office. Examining your communications infrastructure will help prepare your nonprofit for sudden changes.

Electronic Fax Alternatives for Your Nonprofit

In a time of disaster, you might be away from the office or no longer be able to use a landline fax line; with an electronic fax service, you’ll still be able to send and receive messages.

Backup and Recovery

Backing Up Your Data

Remote Backup for Your Organization

Frequent backups (and frequent tests of those backups) are an essential component of disaster preparedness. These articles examine the two main types of backup, local and remote.

Security

Removing Spyware, Viruses, and Other Forms of Malware

While performing routine maintenance chores — such as defragmenting hard drives — can help keep your organization's machines running smoothly, sometimes trouble finds you in the form of malware, software designed to damage a computer system and compromise a user's privacy.

Security Corner

Visit TechSoup’s Security Corner for security strategies and best practices as well as the latest security advisories.

Software

Donated and Discounted Software

TechSoup Stock: Backup Software

Browse TechSoup Stock’s selection of donated and discounted backup software.

Free Software

BackupPC

BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux, WinXX and MacOSX PCs and laptops to a server's disk.

Outlook Add-in: Personal Folders Backup

This add-in simplifies the oft-neglected backup of your personal folders in Microsoft Outlook.

SyncToy

Despite its name, SyncToy is a powerful utility to manage files in different locations, most notably in situations where you would routinely copy files to the same location.