It pays to plan for disaster…

A salutary tale of a charity that has faced having to repay a £185,000 grant because it lost all its records in a flood…

As reported in Third Sector, Aid & Assist, a training charity based in Suffolk, couldn’t produce the evidence of what it had done with the grant income for auditors, and has been facing claims for repayment. Fortunately the Department of Work & Pensions is proving sympathetic and working with them to document what they can.

Aid & Assist isn’t the first organisation, and almost certainly won’t be the last, to discover too late that it is important to protect their information, whether it is held on paper or electronically. But it doesn’t have to be that way…

There are some things you can do to protect your information:

First of all, for critical information held on paper, consider scanning to provide an electronic copy. Scanners don’t have to be expensive, and if the scanning is done when the paper is received, it need not be a huge burden of extra work.

If that’s not an option, consider copying the information and storing copies “off-site”, i.e. out of the office. There are some very reasonably-priced secure self-storage options, as well as more sophisticated archive management services.

Crucially, put in place a back-up regime for electronic information. Again, this doesn’t have to be expensive. Depending on what IT you have (how many PCs, whether or not you are using a server), you can:

• use an online backup service – typically this notes when you change something or add or delete a document, and mirrors that change over the internet to secure servers
• use tape back-up for servers – this involves running a back-up (preferably daily) and then removing tapes from the office – tapes can be reused over time
• archive or copy information to a separate hard disk, preferably one that can be taken off-site – as with tapes, these can be recycled over time

There are far more sophisticated solutions available, and IT service companies (or disaster recovery specialists) are well placed to advise where this is needed. But simple basic protection is affordable and, as Aid & Assist have found, would pay dividends when & if disaster strikes.