Keep running when a provider doesn't.
A plain-language continuity playbook for small orgs — redundancy basics before, an ordered failover during, and a short review after.
Why does a small org need a continuity plan?
Redundancy basics
Most small-org outages hurt because there's exactly one of everything. Redundancy means a second path is already in place when the first one fails — not scrambled together mid-crisis.
- 1Map your single points of failureList the tools you can't operate without: payments, email, your website/CDN, your database, your phone line. Anything with only one provider is a single point of failure.
- 2Keep an offline copy of critical dataA weekly export of your donor/customer list, finances, and contacts — stored somewhere that does NOT depend on the same provider — means an outage is an inconvenience, not a loss.
- 3Have a second channel for each critical jobIf online intake dies, can you take it by phone or paper? If email is down, is there a text or signal group? Decide the backup before you need it.
- 4Write down your provider status pagesBookmark each provider's status page (and the Failover board). In an outage you want to confirm it's them, not you, in seconds.
Failover steps
A calm, ordered response beats heroics. Work the list top to bottom — confirm, contain, communicate, then switch over.
- 1Confirm it's the provider, not youCheck the provider's status page and the Failover board. If they report an incident, stop debugging your own setup.
- 2Contain the blast radiusPause anything that could pile up errors or charge customers twice — scheduled sends, bulk imports, automated retries.
- 3Tell the people affectedA short, honest note ("our booking form is temporarily down — call us at …") prevents lost work and frustrated customers. Don't promise a fix time you don't have.
- 4Switch to the backup pathMove the critical job to the second channel you set up in step 01: phone intake, secondary provider, or a queue to retry once the provider recovers.
- 5Watch for recovery, then catch upWhen the provider clears the incident, re-enable paused jobs deliberately — one at a time — and reconcile anything that queued up during the outage.
Learn from it
The cheapest time to improve resilience is right after an outage, while it's fresh.
- 1Write a 10-minute recapWhat broke, how long, what you did, what it cost. Plain notes — not a formal report.
- 2Fix the one thing that hurt mostPick the single biggest gap the outage exposed and close it this week. Resilience compounds one fix at a time.
- 3Re-test your backupsBackups that have never been restored are not backups. Actually restore a recent export to confirm it works.
The whole plan in one line: Confirm it's them → contain → tell people → switch to the backup → catch up on recovery. Keep the Failover status board open so you know which providers are affected.
General continuity guidance, not legal, security, or insurance advice. Every org is different — adapt these steps to your own tools and obligations. We won't tell you you're "safe"; we'll tell you what to do next.