Emergency Plan

Michelle Tribe 2

Hello friends! There was a small natural disaster in my city over the weekend, and as a result my organization was without power for more than 48 hours. Management asked me to send out an emergency email appeal to ask for assistance from our supporters... but then I realized I couldn't! We self-host Raiser's Edge, and we use NetCommunity to send out email appeals. I use constituent queries to send out the appeals. As our RE server had no power, on NetCommunity I got the "connection to back end office is broken" error, and could not access the email section of BBNC at all.


Now I am tasked to come up with a back-up plan in case there is another emergency (or power outage -- fingers crossed we never go through anything like that again!). My only thought is to make a CSV back-up copy of our email list once a month, and store it either in DropBox or a USB stick, and get ready to purchase a MailChimp account and learn it on the fly. 


Does anyone have any other short-term ideas or solutions?  (In the long term, we will be moving to RE NXT in more than a year, so hopefully this won't be an issue after that.)


Thank you!
Michelle