Related tools:This section helps you prepare background information about your context and capability for your Advocacy Action Plan and Stakeholder Map. If you already have this information, you can skip ahead. |
Other linked resources:To establish the extent, type and risk profile of your digital collections, use:
To model your organization’s digital preservation maturity and skills, use:
You can also use Digital Preservation Management Model, NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation or Digital Preservation Capability Maturity Model to do the same. |
Before you start to advocate, it is important to understand your context, current capabilities and the type and volume of content your organization holds. By assessing where you are now; your policies, resources, and practices, you can define where you want to be and prioritize where you direct your advocacy efforts to have the greatest impact.
Knowing what you have
The DPC Digital Asset Register (DAR) Toolkit can help you and your organization visualize and understand the scope of your digital holdings. Once you have this, it can help make your case for preservation more concrete and urgent. You can use this resource to:
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Create visibility - Many stakeholders underestimate the volume and complexity of digital assets or find it too complex to wrap their heads around. Using the DAR toolkit to create an asset register provides a clear inventory, showing what is at risk if preservation is not addressed.
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Highlight business-critical assets - The toolkit encourages categorization by value and risk, helping you to demonstrate that digital preservation is not just about archives—it is about protecting core business records, compliance data, and intellectual property.
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Provide evidence for resource requests - A well-documented asset register provides you with hard data to justify investment in storage, systems, and staff. It moves the conversation from abstract principles to quantifiable needs.
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Support risk assessment - By identifying assets and their vulnerabilities, the toolkit helps you to explain the potential consequences of inaction, such as legal exposure, reputational damage, or operational disruption.
Once you have completed your Digital Asset Register, you can cross-reference your content with the DPC Global Bit List of Endangered Digital Materials as a way to identify and prioritize what is most at-risk amongst your collection, helping you focus your efforts where they are most urgently required. You could also use the Digital Archiving: Storage media prioritization tool, developed by the team at the University of Glasgow, to help you do this.
Understanding your capabilities.
The DPC Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) is designed to help you understand your organization’s maturity in digital preservation and, by applying this model, you can produce evidence-based data about your organization’s capability and maturity over time, as well as being able to answer questions such as:
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Where is our organization now?
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What are the gaps in our organization’s preservation capabilities and what do we need to progress?
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Where would we like to be in the future?
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How close is our organization to reaching the level of preservation maturity we would like?
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What should the priorities be for improving our organization’s preservation capability?
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What support and resources do we need to help our organization move forward?
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How has our organization’s capability improved over time?
DPC Members may access benchmarking data derived from RAM assessments across the Coalition to help strengthen a case for action.
Other maturity models you could use in the same way include:
The DPC’s Competency Framework and accompanying Competency Audit Toolkit (CAT) link digital preservation skills directly to workforce capability, organizational risk, and service sustainability.
By articulating the skills, knowledge and behaviors required across all roles within an organization, the framework helps practitioners demonstrate that digital preservation is not just a technical function but a shared responsibility requiring planned investment in people as well as technology. The Competency Audit Toolkit enables teams to assess current capability against these competencies, identify gaps and present the results in a structured, non‑confrontational way that resonates with senior leaders.
Used as part of your advocacy endeavors, the outputs from the DPC RAM and CAT can support clear asks for essential digital preservation infrastructure and processes, as well as training, recruitment, role definition or resourcing, and can help reframe digital preservation as an enabler of resilience, compliance and strategic value rather than an optional or specialist add‑on.