How to prepare for a service delivery crisis

Charities provide vital services to their communities. These could include local services, such as after-school clubs, food banks or homeless shelters – or national services such as helplines with specialist advisors or health professionals who provide advice and support.

 

If your charity delivers services, whether online or in-person, it’s vital that you have a robust plan in place in the event of a crisis. This will not only help to lessen the impact but will provide guidance for staff and volunteers on what they need to do.

 

 

What are the main threats to service delivery disruption?

 

One of the biggest threats to a service delivery crisis is tech failure or a cyber attack. These could range in severity from a few hours of downtime to several days. The latter may even result in a data security breach.

 

A loss of funding is another big threat to service delivery. It could mean having to scale back on what you deliver, or in the worst-case scenario closing a service altogether. In the cost-of-living crisis, we have seen local authorities cut funding in a bid to save money, coupled with a sharp increase in the number of charities applying for funding from trusts and foundations, creating a situation where the supply doesn’t meet the demand.

 

With funding cuts and the cost-of-living crisis having a big impact on charities’ ability to deliver services and with staff having to do more with less, staff burnout is a threat that should be closely monitored.

 

 

Tips to help you mitigate a service delivery crisis

 

Whilst you may not be able to fully prevent a crisis occurring that would have a major impact on your service delivery — think the COVID-19 pandemic — there are steps that you can take to help mitigate the risk and lessen the impact on the people needing your services. 

 

 

Conduct a thorough risk assessment

 

Undertake a risk assessment to identify any potential risks to the delivery of your services. These could include tech failure, cyber attacks, the sudden departure of staff, funding cuts etc. Then, using a scale, evaluate them on the likelihood that they could happen and what the impact of the risk would be to your charity.

 

Once you’ve identified the risks and their likelihood and impact, you need to look at how you will mitigate against the risks. For example, for a risk relating to staff burnout you could reduce the likelihood of this happening by having a wellbeing strategy in place, making sure that staff are taking regular breaks as well as using their holiday allowance, offering wellbeing days, implementing flexible working, and so on.

 

 

Invest in cybersecurity software

 

According to research by TwentyFour IT, 32% of UK charities experienced a cyber attack in 2023. Whilst charities rightly want to ensure their income is spent on delivering their mission, it’s crucial that they don’t scrimp on investing in IT and cyber security measures.

 

Some of the ways to help prevent cyber security attacks is to implement multi-factor authentication to access the network. Staff should also be prompted to change their passwords regularly and ensure they use a mixture of letters, numbers and symbols.

 

Staff should receive training on how to spot phishing emails and texts. These are messages that look and sound like they come from someone or somewhere you trust, when they are in fact an attempt to get the respondent to give away personal details. Staff should be trained in what phishing looks like by using examples to illustrate how threats may appear.

 

 

Have a contingency plan in place

 

In the event of your service delivery being disrupted, having a contingency plan will help ensure that you can continue to deliver services to those who need them most. Firstly, identify what is mission critical and who or what needs to be prioritised. Consider alternative ways to deliver the service. For example, could it be moved online or to a different venue if it’s an in-person service?

 

If the disruption is due to staff shortages, could it be outsourced? Consider training volunteers to be able to step in when needed and always have someone on call as a backup.

 

Consider mobilising volunteers in emergency situations. For example, the British Red Cross has thousands of trained emergency response volunteers across the UK who can step in when there is an emergency, such as a snowstorm or flooding that has left people without electricity, water, or heating. They step in to set up emergency shelters and provide practical and emotional support.

 

For your charity, this may mean enabling staff or volunteers to be able to deliver services from their own homes, such as being able to continue to run a helpline or email support service in the event that there’s an IT failure in the office.

 

 

Find out more

 

Our 2025 Reimagining Service Delivery Summit unlocked new perspectives on service delivery and how charities can maximise value to service users. Click here to watch the session recordings for free.

 

Our Reimagining Services Hub features regular articles, podcasts, and webinars to support charities in delivering services. Click here to learn more.