You know your organization leans hard on one or two people, and you carry a low background dread about it, but you have never laid out exactly where the exposure is or what you would do about it.
This guide finds where the loss of a key person would actually hurt you first, whether that is authority, leadership, knowledge, or the simple fact that nothing is written down, and it hands you an ordered plan so you fix the most dangerous gap first instead of the one that happens to be on your mind. It is a sorting instrument, not the plan itself, and it is not a doom exercise designed to frighten you. It takes about ninety minutes and asks you to imagine, specifically and without flinching, that you or another critical person is simply gone next week. Start here if your worry is about a person the organization cannot run without. If your real trouble is that everyday tasks bottleneck on one person but no single absence is a true emergency, the operations and systems work is the better door. And if your worry is losing a building, a system, or your biggest funder rather than a person, that is resilience and disruption planning.
If a cash or legal crisis is happening right now, handle that first. An emergency plan is preventive work, and preventive work waits for the crisis to pass. Steady the immediate thing, then come back. You can start from the welcome page.
You cannot plan for a loss you have not made concrete. Name the person or people the organization cannot currently run without, for most organizations this is you first, and sometimes one or two others. Then, for each, walk through the first two weeks without them and write down what would actually stop: what could not be signed, what could not be accessed, what decisions would stall, and which relationships would go dark.
Open the Dependence Picture →Place your exposure in the part of the problem that is most dangerous, because that decides which guide you do first. Answer each statement the way it really is. The statements are worded as strengths, so an honest not true is where your gap lives. Most organizations are weak in more than one, and that is normal.
A rating on paper is worth little until you run it against a real scenario. Walk the specific case: you are gone with no notice on a Monday. Ask, hour by hour and then day by day, who is called, who signs, who decides, who leads, and whether the board could meet and act. Where the honest answer is worse than your rating, trust the honest answer. The board-readiness question above is the part leaders most often assume away, so answer it with the Board Chair independently.
Open the Gone-Tomorrow Reality Check →Turn the finding into an ordered plan that names your first guide, the guides that follow, and the pieces you can skip because they are already covered. Sequence by danger: authority and leadership before knowledge, because the first two decide whether the organization can operate and lead at all. Add Write, Adopt, and Maintain the Emergency Plan as the closing guide, because the pieces are not a plan until they are assembled, adopted by the board, and kept current. Give the very first guide a real start date.
Open the Emergency Succession Priority Plan →Your answers stay in your browser on this page and are never sent anywhere. Use Save or print to keep your copy.
Two moments here call for someone outside these pages. If the key-person risk is really that you, the leader, are personally at a breaking point, running on empty, then your own health comes before any plan on paper, and that calls for a trusted person or a professional now, not a worksheet. And if making backup signing or banking authority legally real means changing who can bind the organization, that step needs a nonprofit attorney and your bank, because authority that is not legally valid is not authority. Naming either of these is not the guide failing. It is the guide being honest about where its edge is.
Once the acute work is done and you are on your feet, it is worth stepping back to look at the whole organization, not just the piece that was on fire. There is a short whole-organization check-up waiting for you when you are ready. That is not a sales pitch. It is the next honest thing to look at. The whole-organization check-up →