#72 - 4 Steps to Preparing Your Ministry for Disasters with Pete Marra from Colson Center

Ministry At Scale

In this session from the Digital Ministry Conference, Pete Marra, the Vice President of Innovation at the Colson Center discusses how to get started with risk mitigation for your ministry.

Your Ministry is Like the Three Little Pigs

In the story of the three little pigs, each pig picked different materials to build their house, one used straw, another used sticks and the last pig used bricks. When the Big Bad Wolf stopped by and began huffing and puffing the results were often disastrous for the little pigs. Your ministry is likely built on straw, sticks or bricks as well, though it is most likely a combination of materials and risk assessments will help you identify the areas your ministry is being held together by straw.

Building Resilience Through and N+1 Mindset

N+1 comes from network administration. It stands for Node plus 1 which means you have your main node (server, channel, means of communication etc.) plus an alternate or backup in case something happens to the main node. When thinking about this in your ministry you need to think beyond just your data, you need to think about N+1 in terms of people, processes, and technology.

The 4 A’s of Risk Mitigation

Assessment - What is it that you are going to measure to assess the risk score of your ministry. This will be based on probability and impact.

Alignment - This is about bringing agreement across your team as to what your risk is and how you will handle it.

Assignment - This is where you decide who will head up your risk mitigation plan.

Action - This is where you put your plan into action and start building resilience into your ministry.

Resilience Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive

One simple way to ensure you don’t lose your data is to download it from the cloud and store it offline somewhere. For example you could get a backup of your email list.

Bottom line Pete, wants to make sure that the biggest takeaway you have from his talk is to get started, anything you put in place is better than having nothing in place to mitigate risk. Pete shares many more practical ideas so be sure to listen to the full episode, but whatever you do, get started now.