Covid-19 Proves the Value of Solid Business Continuity Planning Practices

As a national association, AARP has no higher priority than to empower people to choose how they live as they age. Key to supporting this mission is providing excellent service to the organization’s 38 million members. And one important means of serving members is responding to their communications, the vast majority of which arrive via the U.S. Postal Service.

“The most common forms of mail we receive include membership join and renewal requests, donations to the AARP Foundation, correspondence around our advocacy work, responses to questionnaires, and advocacy petitions,” says Jim O’Brien, vice president and assistant treasurer for AARP. “That said, the written correspondence we receive covers many topics.

“A letter may be notification that a member has passed away, or has gotten remarried,” he continues. “Someone might be requesting additional copies of the magazine. They might want us to know their partner has dementia. They might want information about caregiving. These communications arrive in all forms, including handwritten notes in cursive, which no machine can read. And the list of topics goes on and on—and on.”

AARP’s Lakewood, California, treasury operations center has traditionally processed all correspondence, totaling about 3 million pieces each month. “The revenue that comes in by payments is important, but the information that we get from members is equally important,” says Karen Mercer, AARP’s treasurer. “If a member is sending in a renewal or join request, we want to get them a member card quickly because that’s tied to discounts the member is entitled to. For research, or even one-off correspondence, the information we receive can be very impactful. We might hear from people that they can’t afford their drugs or they don’t have enough food.”

The organization’s mission is to empower Americans 50 and older. Doing so requires quick response to, and/or utilization of, whatever information members send through the mail. Any delay in processing a communication might reduce the value AARP can provide to that member, and so might impact their satisfaction with the organization.

However, when O’Brien joined the organization two decades ago, AARP did not have a detailed plan in place to ensure business continuity. “I came from a banking background and immediately recognized the need to better prepare for failover in the event of a disaster,” he says. “We launched a comprehensive program to address both short-term and longer-term issues. Being in California, our treasury operations center might experience earthquakes, fires, floods, or other regional issues. We wanted to make sure we would continue to be responsive to member communications, whatever may happen.”

The treasury group evaluated their options for enhancing business resiliency. They considered relocating the Lakewood facility. They considered adding a second AARP facility to serve as a mail-handling backup. And they evaluated third parties that could step in when necessary.

“We conducted a comprehensive RFP [request for proposals] evaluating lockbox providers,” O’Brien says. “We decided that the best approach would be for us to partner with a strong vendor that owns its facilities and has the resources to take on our large volume of mail when needed, on a contingent basis.”

Through this process, O’Brien’s project team determined that BNY Mellon had both the capabilities and capacity to provide business continuity to AARP. “We found that some bank lockboxes specialize in tasks like checking payment coupons for utility bills,” Mercer says. “Our work is more complex and frequently requires the keying of information. That’s a different service level than many lockbox operations provide, which narrowed the number of entities we could consider.”

The team established a procedure for declaring a disaster, which would result in failover of mail processing to BNY Mellon. They also developed processing instructions that detail how the lockbox staff should handle all types of correspondence that AARP might receive. For standard correspondence, they should enter information into the appropriate systems. For non-standard correspondence, they should create a digital image of the paper copy and then route it to AARP’s customer care team.

Next, the AARP project team began routing a portion of daily correspondence received by the Lakewood facility—around 10 percent—to the BNY Mellon lockbox. “This all happened long before we ever needed the bank to handle all our mail,” Mercer explains. “It prepared them, though, and reassured us that all the systems were ready and the staff were trained. All we had to do was declare a disaster, which would flip the switch and send the majority of our mail to BNY Mellon, where it would be handled properly.”

Prior to Covid-19, the organization had re-routed a significant proportion of its mail to BNY Mellon only once, when a fire was approaching a mail-sorting facility. But in early 2020, as soon as local shelter-in-place orders required AARP to minimize staff in the treasury operations center, the organization declared a disaster and transferred processing of most member communications to the bank. To support the bank’s ramp-up of mail volume, temporary workers from the AARP facility transitioned to the nearby BNY Mellon site.

The transition happened smoothly, over the course of a few days. “One key to ensuring that we didn’t have any problems in transferring the mail processing was our acceleration of communications,” O’Brien says. “At the outset of the pandemic, we talked with the Bank of New York Mellon team several times a day. Flights were being canceled, and mail was being trucked from place to place. At the same time, the bank was facing all the same pandemic challenges as every other organization in the world.

“Touching base so frequently ensured that we understood any impacts mail flow issues might have on our member communications,” he continues. “We would look at capacity in each lockbox location, measure the impact of different events on mail flow, and address any processing issues. Eventually, the frequency of those conversations fell to a few times a week, but we would still speak more often anytime something changed and the bank had questions.”

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As a result of this well-planned and well-executed transition, AARP members continued receiving services without interruption, and the organization’s cash flows continued unabated. Slowly, in the nearly two years since the pandemic arrived in California, AARP has moved in the opposite direction, bringing much of that mail processing back in-house.

“We’re moving tranches of work back, based on the ebbs and flows of our volume,” O’Brien says. “Now, the AARP treasury operations center is processing between 50 percent and 60 percent of our work.”

As life moves closer to the pre-pandemic normal, AARP isn’t resting on its laurels. “We’ve taken this opportunity to fine-tune our recovery plan,” O’Brien says. “We’re looking at what worked, what didn’t work and why it didn’t work, and what we should be doing differently. This experience has also led us to work with marketing groups within AARP to solve for the question: Why do people feel more comfortable sending us mail? Are there ways we could help transition members to rely more on digital communications?” For now, though, AARP executives and treasury staff can rest easier knowing that whatever kind of disaster they may face, their critical communications with members can continue without a hitch.