Does your business have a plan when disaster strikes? Whether it’s a natural disaster or a PR crisis, having a ready-made playbook on hand will help you come out stronger on the other side of any emergency. 💪
While few businesses can predict a big disaster like the pandemic, companies with a recovery procedure in place can be better positioned to act faster in the future. When you invest in a business continuity plan (BCP), you can keep your team safe, avoid business disruptions, and protect your brand image.
A business continuity plan covers all the potential emergency situations that could impact your business. But it takes time to create a solid continuity plan—and you need to focus your energy on the meat of the plan, not on formatting.
Fortunately, BCP templates make it a breeze to quickly create contingency plans that leave no stone unturned. 🔍
In this guide, we’ll explain what a continuity plan template is, explain the key components of a BCP template, and share our top 10 free business continuity plan templates.
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Summarize this article for me pleaseA continuity plan template is a structured document that helps your business continue operating even during an emergency. At its core, a continuity plan template is all about preparedness. Whether you’re facing a natural disaster like a tornado or a human-made outage from a cyberattack, a BCP template gives you a roadmap to minimize business disruption and downtime. This isn’t just for big enterprises, either. Small businesses are more susceptible to disasters because they have fewer resources, so it’s extra important for small businesses to create a continuity plan. The downside is that creating a BCP takes time and resources, which is why so many businesses don’t have one. Luckily, following a ready-made template can shave hours off the BCP creation process. It also helps you look at several facets of disaster preparedness so you’re less likely to overlook something important.
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Summarize this article for me pleaseA business continuity plan keeps your business running even when the going gets tough. Creating a plan takes time, but with the right template, you can streamline formatting and get straight to the good stuff. Check out these 10 free continuity plan templates to speed up the continuity plan creation process. ⚡
This template even includes pretty visualizations and colors to draw your attention to the right places. Create custom statuses, fields, and views to make the template your own.
The ClickUp Business Continuity Plan Template also integrates with your ClickUp project management tools so you can generate tasks, track time, create dependencies, and more without leaving your BCP template. 🤩
A contingency plan is different from a continuity plan. This type of BCP template identifies potential risks, lists possible solutions, and gives your team a strategic plan to respond to the most likely disruptions.
The ClickUp Contingency Plan Template gives your team an expert framework for:
The great thing about this template is that it provides a process for creating a unique contingency plan tailored to the risks you care about the most. It also identifies team members’ responsibilities and tasks for every scenario, making your next steps crystal clear.
We saw firsthand how easily a pandemic can cause massive business disruptions. But some disasters are more (and less) likely to have an impact on your business.
For example, if you’re in the Midwest, hurricanes probably aren’t on your radar. However, if your supply chain relies on materials brought in from the coast, you’re probably going to care a lot about hurricanes. 🌀
The ClickUp Probability and Impact Matrix Template will help you sort through which risks are most likely to disrupt your business. It even ranks these risks in terms of potential damage to help you prioritize your time and resources. This way, you prep for the most damaging (and likely) emergencies first.
This template is a must-have if your team struggles to make informed decisions or prioritize tasks. This business continuity plan template even includes a simple visualization you can share with other team members to make informed group decisions in less time. 🙌
A business impact analysis (BIA) identifies potential risks to your company. Once you identify the risks, the BIA logs all of the action plans you can activate in case of an emergency.
For starters, log every potential emergency in an issue tracking template. From there, use the ClickUp Business Impact Analysis Template to quickly plug in criteria like financial impact, brand reputation, customer experience, and more. ✨
This continuity plan template helps teams get out of unproductive cycles of anxiety by focusing on plan activation. Instead of going with your gut in a crisis, this rubric-style template supports calm, objective decisions using quantified data.
Once you know the higher-priority emergencies that could affect your business, you might still need help prioritizing which ones to address first. Use the ClickUp Priority Matrix Whiteboard Template to get clarity on which disaster plans and tasks you should execute first.
You can use this template during the planning phase of creating a continuity plan or even when a disaster strikes. The Priority Matrix gets your team on the same page, ranks the urgency of various tasks, and visualizes everything for your group in a pretty graph. 📊
Every business continuity plan template should contain an emergency plan of some kind. The ClickUp Emergency Plan Template is useful not only for your continuity plan, but also for emergency signage throughout your building.
You’re free to customize the plan to your liking, but out of the box, the template includes:
Some businesses make a single emergency plan while others will need to create multiples. For example, you can create an emergency plan for fires and a separate one for tornadoes. 🌪️
Keep in mind that local, state, or federal laws will apply to emergency signs. Check with your legal team to ensure you display these signs per those requirements.
Some business continuity plan templates are designed for protecting business operations or the public, but it’s important to have a plan for protecting your employees too. The ClickUp Workplace Emergency Action Plan Template helps you do just that.
This is a more in-depth emergency plan that helps you:
An emergency plan is great because it equips your employees with the skills and knowledge required to rise above an emergency. Some insurance carriers require businesses to have a documented emergency plan, so this can also help you secure coverage. 🌻
ClickUp is an all-in-one workplace solution, so storing your emergency action plan in the same platform as your tasks and chats makes it more accessible for the entire team.
Are you a Microsoft company? Then you’ll love the Word Business Continuity Plan Template by Disaster Recovery Plan Template. It’s a publicly available version of MIT’s Business Continuity Plan, so you can trust that it covers all your bases.
This free continuity plan template includes sections for:
Downloads are available for Word and Adobe PDF, but the template’s text is available on the website if you don’t want to download it.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) regulates the investment industry. Investments are all about risk management, so it’s no surprise that FINRA released a free Small Firm Business Continuity Plan Template.
A continuity plan is required if you’re a small brokerage firm or if you’re otherwise required to follow FINRA guidelines. Instead of wondering whether you’re compliant, follow FINRA’s continuity plan template for more peace of mind. 🧘
It includes sections for:
You should still tailor the template to your unique needs, but the template will help you save a lot of time.
LegalTemplate’s Word Business Continuity Plan Template is no-frills, but it includes all the information you need to create your own business continuity plan.
We like that the site actually takes you through a structured process to create an incident response plan (IRP), emergency response plan (ERP), supply chain continuity plan, and other types of continuity plans that you might need.
LegalTemplates also throws in a few helpful tips for tracking your continuity plan goals over time. They say you need to review the checklist twice a year, practice implementing everything once a year, and do a formal revamp of your continuity plan every other year.
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