01 Oct 2025

IM Blog: Physical Records Are Forever: Lessons from The Salvation Army's Mount Everest

Physical records are forever, not just for Christmas - perfectly captures one of the most overlooked challenges facing organisations in our Digital Age.

While we're all busy digitising processes and embracing cloud technologies, there's an elephant in the room that many records and information management professionals know all too well: those towering stacks of archive boxes that seem to multiply when no one's looking.

At The Salvation Army Australia, we know this challenge intimately. Our organisation faced an ever growing 'Mount Everest of archive boxes' – more than 30,000 boxes in commercial storage alone, plus the equivalent ofanother 10,000 boxes stored across hundreds of locations nationwide. If you've ever walked into a storage room and felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of physical records, you'll understand the magnitude of this challenge.

The Hidden Costs That Kill Budgets

Here's the uncomfortable truth about physical records: they're expensive in ways that don't always show up on your budget spreadsheets. For The Salvation Army, like many organisations, the visible costs were just the tip of the iceberg.

The obvious expenses include:

Commercial storage vendor fees that arrive like clockwork every month
Staff time spent preparing boxes for transfer
Administrative overhead for monitoring box lifecycles and processing invoices
Search and retrieval costs when someone actually needs to find something

But the hidden costs? That's where things get painful:

Real estate opportunity costs - every square metre used for storage could serve your organisation's actual mission
Personnel productivity losses - staff spending hours hunting through boxes instead of delivering services
Compliance risks - not knowing what you have makes it impossible to manage retention schedules properly

For The Salvation Army, which assisted more than 250,000 people and provided $24.3 million in financial assistance in 2024, these hidden costs were becoming unsustainable. When funding sources are shrinking due to cost-of-living pressures while service demand increases, every dollar spent on inefficient records management is a dollar not spent on helping people in need.

The PII Time Bomb

Perhaps even scarier than the financial implications are the privacy risks lurking in those archive boxes. The Salvation Army captures significant volumes of personally identifiable information - identity documents, financial records, case files, photographs, audio recordings and film. Sound familiar?
Under Australia's Privacy Act 1988 and its 13 Australian Privacy Principles, organisations must know what personal information they hold and protect it appropriately. But here's the catch: if you don't know what's in those thousands of boxes, how can you meet these privacy obligations?
The nightmare scenario is a notifiable data breach involving physical records. Imagine trying to explain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner that you're not sure what information was compromised because you didn't have proper visibility over your physical holdings. The potential consequences are sobering:

Significant harm to individuals whose information is disclosed
Devastating reputational damage
Substantial legal and financial penalties

This isn't just a theoretical risk - it's a compliance time bomb ticking in storage facilities and back rooms across the country.

Building the Foundation for Success

Our approach to tackling this challenge offers valuable lessons for any organisation facing similar mountains of physical records. The key insight? You can't solve this problem overnight, but you can build the right foundation and tackle it systematically.

The building blocks The Salvation Army put in place include:

Executive sponsorship - ensuring leadership understands and champions the initiative
Policy framework - developing retention and disposal standards that evolve with understanding
Vendor consolidation - moving from multiple storage providers to a single partner (Grace Records Management)
Internal governance - establishing data and information forums with diverse membership
Stakeholder engagement - building relationships across departments and service levels

The project was structured around realistic 6-month goal periods, each with specific, measurable outcomes. This approach provides regular wins to maintain momentum while preventing scope creep from overwhelming the initiative.

Lessons from the Trenches

Things I’ve learned along the way that offer practical wisdom for other IM professionals:

Resourcing Reality: This isn't a one-person job. The volume of work demands proper staffing, though creative solutions like engaging volunteers can help bridge resource gaps as well as engaging fixed-term project staff.
Vendor Partnership: Choose your storage partner carefully - they're not just a supplier but a key collaborator in your success. Grace Records Management's willingness to coordinate transfers between legacy vendors proved crucial.
Scope Management: What starts as vendor consolidation quickly becomes organisation-wide information governance. The 6-month goal structure helps maintain focus and prevents the project from becoming unwieldy.
Policy Evolution: Your retention and disposal standards will need constant refinement as you discover what records you actually hold and how long you need them.
Relationship Investment: Success depends entirely on building and maintaining stakeholder relationships across the organisation. These relationships will be ‘rich and generous, usually helpful and occasionally frustrating’ - but absolutely essential.

The Path Forward

The Salvation Army's Physical Offsite Storage project demonstrates that organisations can tackle their physical records challenges, but it requires commitment, proper resourcing and realistic expectations. The goal isn't perfection - it's progress.

Project success depends on ‘getting our building blocks right, maintaining and strengthening our internal and external stakeholder relationships, matching scope to available resourcing and delivering tangible outcomes within 6-monthly time frames sufficient to satisfy the stakeholders.’

For records and information management professionals facing their own Mount Everest of archive boxes, the message is clear: start climbing. Build your foundation, secure your resources, engage your stakeholders and tackle the challenge systematically. Your organisation's budget, compliance posture and peace of mind depend on it.

After all, physical records really are forever – unless you do something about them.

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