Growing the Audience for IT Disaster Planning and Recovery

Last fall, TechSoup decided to review and revise “The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery.” Our primary objective was to make this narrowly focused document, originally designed for the technically inclined, more readable and applicable to a broader audience of organizations and individuals who might face a disaster event.

As an organization skilled at reaching and educating nonprofits around their general technology needs, we were looking to partner with a clear subject matter expert on this sensitive topic. The Center for Disaster Philanthropy was a natural choice. Over the course of several months, Kim Maphis Early and Regine Webster brought their deep of knowledge of disasters, relief and recovery to bear on the Guide, helping improve and update the content for our English-speaking nonprofit audience. Their overall editorial guidance allowed us to effectively capture new developments in disaster recovery along with external resources for continuity solutions.
We’re already seeing the benefits of our partnership with CDP. Since we launched the guide in February:

• It has been downloaded more than 1,500 times;
• We’ve been approached by partners who want to translate it into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin and Arabic;
• We’ve published a shorter recovery-only guide; and
• Our community of corporate partners has begun sharing the guide through their content channels dedicated to disaster awareness.

As the Senior Director, Alliances and Community Engagement at TechSoup, I often work with external vendors and partners. In my experience, few organizations are able to marry quality deliverables with client-centered work, issue-specific expertise, and a mission-driven focus the way CDP did for us. Considering the response, we are excited to continue building out the partnership—translating and digitizing the content with CDP in order to bring this solid piece of work to our nearly one million registered organizations around the world.
Check out the guide here: http://www.techsoup.org/disaster-planning-and-recovery.

To learn more about how our advisory services can help your organization increase your impact and lead your community in the face of disaster, please contact: Regine Webster at Regine.Webster@disasterphilanthropy.org or (206) 972-0187.