A well‑defined Disaster Recovery Plan ensures that your organisation can continue to operate even when your core systems are offline, reducing downtime and protecting member data.
Here we share the importance of creating a disaster recovery plan and how to build a plan in 3 key steps.
What type of disaster?
Disasters affecting the availability of a CRM System can come in several forms, including:
- Data-Centre outage
- Server Failure
- Data Integrity or Ransomware Attack
- Data Corruption
- Payment Processing Failures
- Human Error (overwriting or accidental deletion of records)
- Natural Disasters
Disasters aren’t always dramatic events – sometimes it’s a simple technical failure or human error. But all these events can take core systems offline, and when that happens, you need a clear plan in place to keep essential services running.
Why is it important to have a disaster recovery plan?
For unions, the CRM or membership management system underpins almost everything — from taking payments, to managing membership details, to communicating with members.
If that system goes down, even briefly, it can cause financial impact, reputational damage, and operational disruption. So, disaster recovery isn’t a ‘nice to have’; it’s a core part of organisational resilience.
How to create a Disaster Recovery Plan
Identify the essential services that you need to maintain to “keep the lights on”.
The first step is to outline the core services your organisation must maintain, even during a major incident. These are the functions that keep operations active and members supported. For most membership organisations, this includes the ability to process payments for existing members, renewals or new sign-ups and being able to communicate with members. Understanding which services are mission‑critical helps you prioritise where to focus your recovery efforts.
Review your existing infrastructure setup. What is already in place to support your Disaster recovery plan?
Before building or updating your Disaster Recovery Plan, take stock of what already exists within your technical setup.
If your CRM is cloud-based, ensure it operates from:
- Mirrored data centres (data stored across multiple locations)
- Includes built‑in redundancy (when a system can continue even if some parts fail)
- Failover processes (switching to a standby system when the main system fails).
Confirm that your data is being backed up regularly, identify where those backups are stored, and verify that they can be accessed and restored quickly when needed.
You should also assess how dependent you are on your CRM for communicating with members. If it becomes unavailable, do you have an alternative communication platform ready to use, such as your marketing or email automation system? Check that your marketing platform contains accurate, up‑to‑date member data so you can identify all active members without relying solely on your CRM.
Define your Response and Recovery plan.
Once you’ve identified essential services and assessed your systems, the next step is to define a clear Response and Recovery plan. This outlines exactly what your organisation will do if your CRM or other key systems become unavailable. You should document how you will continue to take payments, issue renewals, manage new member applications, and communicate urgent updates.
This plan should detail who is responsible for taking action, which tools or backup systems they will use, and how long each step should take. The aim is to ensure your team can act confidently and quickly so that members continue to receive the service and communication they expect.
A good Disaster Recovery plan considers three phases.
1. Preparedness
Being prepared is the foundation of an effective Disaster Recovery Plan. Preparation determines response speed and the potential impact on members’ trust.
This step focuses on having alternative solutions in place.
For example:
- Issuing Direct Debit mandates if your main systems become unavailable
- Having reliable data backups that allow you to identify membership dues
- Being able to communicate with your members outside of your primary system
2. Response
Your Disaster Recovery Plan should clearly document when and how it will be activated. This includes:
- The duration of the outage before the disaster recovery plan should be invoked (e.g. service outage of more than 24 hours)
- A committee or agreed personal that can trigger the plan, ensuring decisions can be made promptly and consistently.
- A defined Member communications process (e.g email/SMS templates and webpages ready to go)
- The steps for bringing the alternative process online is documented and doesn’t rely on one key member of staff to activate this
3. Recovery
The last step is creating a plan for restoring service to your CRM. During the outage, any data captured using your alternative processes will likely be out of date or stored in different formats. Your plan should therefore include a clear, documented method for restoring this information. This may involve extracting data from interim systems, amending it into the correct structure, and loading it safely back into the CRM.
How to test your Disaster Recovery Plan
Once your Disaster Recovery plan is in place, it’s important to validate that this works as expected. Testing ensures that your team can execute the plan with confidence and that each step is documented accurately.
Ensure that the full sequence of recovery activities is documented in a dedicated DR Runbook. This should include:
- Step-by-step procedures for each stage of the recovery process
- Defined roles and responsibilities for all involved
- The order in which tasks must be completed
- Any system dependencies or prerequisites
Running a simulation will help identify any flaws or bottlenecks in the plan and will allow you to accurately document the time it takes to complete each step.
Start with a “Tabletop” test – this is essentially a discussion-based walkthrough of the required steps with all responsible parties. You can use the tabletop test to validate and refine the DR Runbook.
Then move to a Parallel Test – a full technical simulation. Where possible, you should use non-production environments to run the simulation to reduce the risk of impacting live systems. Parallel testing will give you insight into how long each step takes and will help identify any issues or operational bottlenecks.
Final thoughts
The greatest risk is a cyber incident combined with organisational unpreparedness.
Therefore, a structured Disaster Recovery Plan is one of the most important documents a membership organisation or union can implement.
Investing time in building and maintaining this plan will help your organisation protect member data. By preparing alternative processes, documenting clear response procedures, and establishing a reliable recovery strategy, your organisation will be more confident in facing potential disasters and minimising their impact.
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