In 2025 the Business Continuity & Resilience Awareness Week, BCAW+R will take place from 19th to 23rd May. This annual event used to be named Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) .
BCAW+R will provide a focal point for raising awareness of business continuity and resilience within organizations and this article looks at how you can make the most of it.
Getting involved in BCAW+R
Organized by the BCI, BCAW+R provides a number of activities and opportunities for involvement; and some forward planning will enable organizations to make the most of the week. Areas to think about include:
- The BCI offers a number of resources for promoting BCAW+R within your organization; including downloadable posters and other collateral. Starting to use these early will help to build momentum. These will be available here.
- BCAW+R will include a wide-ranging webinar programme relating to the theme of ‘Empowering tomorrow: building resilience today’ – encouraging relevant people in your organization to get appropriate webinars in their diary early is an easy win.
- Run an exercise during BCAW week: building your organization’s BCAW+R awareness raising around an exercise is a good way to focus minds on the week’s aims. Exercises provide a touchpoint with many people in the organization who the business continuity and resilience teams do not normally have contact with, so this creates a great opportunity to incorporate awareness raising activities.
- Hold an open day/session: invite other departments to come and see first-hand what business continuity entails and how it’s contributing to the wider resilience of your organization to increase engagement.
General awareness raising tips
The general aim of BCAW+R is to help raise awareness of business continuity and resilience. Here are some general tips for how to improve in this area:
- It’s important to match awareness raising activities with the employees ‘need to know’: overkill and information overload are counter productive and will result in confusion and lack of information retention. Match awareness raising activities to the employee’s level of business continuity and resilience responsibility.
- Keep it simple: you may have an expert knowledge of business continuity and resilience, but you don’t need to pass this all on! Just provide the least amount of information you can to achieve the awareness raising aims.
- Where possible, make awareness raising part of the organization’s processes rather than just being a standalone activity. Use any touchpoints with employees as an awareness raising opportunity. For example, if asking for BIA information use this as an opportunity to explain what the information will be used for.
- Use business continuity and resilience exercises as an opportunity to raise more general awareness – explain to non-participants why an exercise has taken place and what the results will achieve. Make sure exercise participants understand why they are taking part and how the exercise fuels the business continuity and resilience process.
- Use a campaign approach to build knowledge: you don’t have to present all your information at once, and in fact doing so is probably not going to be an effective method! A campaign approach is a pre-planned scheduled release of information using various dissemination methods to build a bigger picture in small bite-sized pieces.
- Test understanding: don’t assume that your awareness raising has worked – check understanding; through the use of quizzes, for example.
- Measure and review: the old adage that ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’ is true for awareness raising activities. Combine the individual results of your ‘testing understanding’ activities (see above point) to measure the success of your awareness raising activities. Also use simple verbal and written feedback methods to assess what worked and what didn’t.
- Keep it going! Short bite sized reminders sent at regular intervals will help to keep people aware of the existence and importance of business continuity and resilience.
