Succession Plan

Current state of things #

As of today, I either have admin rights or full control of all aspects of our district’s web presence. This includes:

• Admin rights on https://facebook.com/groups/indianspringsbsa/
• Ownership of the indianspringsbsa.org and isdbsa.org. domains. That includes:
  • the actual domains’ registration
  • DNS for the domains
• Ownership of the Netlify account used for hosting our website
• Ownership of the GitHub repository that contains the code behind our website
• Ownership of our Mailchimp account
• Ownership of the server that emails to *@indianspringsbsa.org are delivered to
• Ownership of the indianspringsbsa.slack.com Slack instance
• Possession of the files from the old website

Why I have all of this #

When I joined the district as a Commissioner I learned that the previous webmaster had stepped down recently. I also saw that our website had several shortcomings, with the biggest being that it was all but unusable on a phone. After talking with the District Committee about my background and the district’s needs, I offered to help our temporarily. Not too long after that I went to Wood Badge and decided to have my ticket focus on improving our site. My ticket included these goals:

• make the site mobile friendly
• provide a centralized place for district committees updates to be posted
• automatically distribute committee updates to key 3 in a timely manner after each month’s meeting
• add information in Spanish to our site that will help connect native Spanish speakers with units in our district that already have Spanish-speaking members
• generate a succession plan for the website’s management

Since then I have moved from helping out on a temporary basis to officially taking care of things as a part of the District Committee.

Steps needed for someone else to run things #

Besides transferring credentials to a successor and ensuring said person has a GitHub account, the main thing would be to determine if the successor is willing and able to do the things I’m doing today.

If yes… #

This would be the ideal case as it would really just be us coordinating a handover of the items listed in the first section.

If no… #

The reality is that this is the more probable scenario and, therefore, the one the district should have a plan for. In this scenario it is likely that some money would have to be paid to have a company provide some of the services I operate today. The reason for this is twofold. Below are some details and likely paths forward.

• First, and foremost, I have a server that I run my own things on and that’s the same server routing emails today. Operating email isn’t a trivial exercise and isn’t something many individuals are going to be willing to do on their own. In this case, the easiest solution would probably be to engage Gandi, our domain registrar, for this. An alternative would be G Suite for Nonprofits or Office 365 Nonprofit.
• Second, someone who understands the technology needs to be caring for the website’s codebase. It’s likely the district would need to employ some form of professional services to take care of this. Both the Google and Microsoft options above would require working through Techsoup anyhow so they would be my suggested first call for tech support.

Either way #

Regard less of which scenario above plays out, it would be preferable to have a successor shadow me for 3-6 months to facilitate a smooth transition.