As 95% of my client base are charities or not for profit groups who may have a dependency on local government funding; it is not too surprising to learn that some groups are merging, and some groups are no longer able to function due to the cuts in funding and are ceasing to provide services and closing. Some of these have been established for over 20 years.
When a board makes a decision to close down a service or entity, there are some things that are worth thinking about as part of the close down plan on the IT side. I have had to deal with some of these issues with one group over the past month. I am noting them here, in case this applies to any other groups.
Turn out the lights
When an organisation closes, what happens after it closes is generally not foremost in people’s minds; understandably so. Particularly from the employees, or volunteers perspective. You don’t simply turn off the lights and hand over the keys on the last day.
Communications
Around one month before the office closes or earlier place a message on your site to advise your users that the service is about to be withdrawn. The timing of this is down to your board.
On the date you close, you need to rationalise the website removing most of the content if not all of it, and reduce it down to a single page. On this page you need to state that the service is now closed and no longer available from this location. You may wish to add why it has closed as well.
It is also advisable to provide some guidance on where to go to next, so if someone else has taken over the role of providing the service, or there are neighbouring (related) groups as in the case of Home-Start, then provide links to them within your website. In this case you will be helping your adjacent groups providing the same service. In the case of organisations that work within county boundaries, remember an adjacent service might be just over a county boundary.
Snail Mail
If you are forwarding postal mail from the office for a period, it may be a good idea to retain the postal address of the office on the website. If you are not forwarding postal mail, then remove it. Or if your forwarding service stops after 3 months make sure I am aware of it and I can make the edits on the website.
Before you close the office, check the email accounts and action anything outstanding that needs attention, and clear out any old email. Do not leave it in the email box.
If you are using the mail service through your hosting account with me there is an auto responder associated with each mail account. It is possible to add a quite detailed message and send it out to anyone that tries to contact you through the old email address. Within this message it may offer contact details for trustees responsible for closing the charity. You will be helping the management team to close the charity if you leave some channels of communication open. Not everyone will be aware from day one. So you should assume that the email accounts continue for as long as the hosting is active.
The auto responder can be set up to respond to each sender’s email address once within a period of time, say 48 hrs. So multiple emails from the same person will only generate one reply in a 48 hr period.
How long do I need to maintain this service?
General guidance would be 6-12 months after the entity closes. Provided we plan this together and I am aware of when you are closing I can modify the hosting plan to fit your needs.
The way I operate currently is everything is automatically renewed on the assumption that you are continuing to operate your service. In that way you do not need to worry about continuity of service. However if you are closing then I can in some cases reduce the renewal period of a domain name from 2yrs to 1yr, which reduces your costs. I can also reduce the hosting monthly charge to accommodate say 6 months rather than 12, or some other value.
Please keep me informed
If you are going through the process of closing down, or merging there are some things I can do to help you. These range from stripping the site down for you, to adding new links into the site to redirect people to the new entity. So a quick call is appreciated to ensure I am not informed at the last minute, then we can plan what needs to happen when.