Setting up a club, organisation or NFP isn’t without hard work and risks. There is a lot of work involved to ensure you meet a range of regulatory and legal requirements, and although there is a risk you may fail to meet, or inadvertently miss one of these regulations, risk doesn’t stop there.

Ensuring you have the right people, with the required qualifications and experience to meet the regulatory and legal prerequisites may be your first hurdle. Just because someone has been a treasurer of a club or committee previously doesn’t necessarily mean the meet the conditions for your organisation.

Even if they do, there are other things to be aware of. If you have volunteers or board members on your premises, whether you’re set up for your home office or an external one, you are responsible for the safety, health and wellbeing of these people.

This extends to visitors to your premises, such as clients, parents, or others, and to threats against your members or volunteers.

You’re also responsible for the actions and behaviours of your volunteers, employees, and board members. There is the risk that you’ll experience mismanagement or mishandling of accounts, documents or customer service.

This can lead to non-compliance issues or breach of legal or contractual obligations. Although unlikely, there are more criminal issues, such as theft of fraud that you may, unfortunately, experience.

Dissatisfaction of customers/clients, volunteers or board members is also something to be aware of. Depending on the level of dissatisfaction, and how loud they are about them, you may face unwanted or unfavourable attention and publicity. This can be of significant detriment to your club or organisation, and something that can take months, or even years, to overcome.

There is also the possibility of equipment failure, such as computer hard drives crashing, or security becoming vulnerable. There are steps you can take to ensure you have all your data backed up, and your client database and other IP kept safe and secure, but you can’t always prevent a computer malfunction, networks going down, or power-outs occurring.

Risks like these are difficult to plan for and impossible to predict, yet they are more common than we like to consider.

With the exception of deliberate criminal activities and equipment malfunction, many errors or issues are a result of human error, miscommunication or misinterpretation, or something simply being placed in the “too hard” basket, with the full intention of getting around to it when there is time to do so.

This doesn’t absolve you or your organisation, but it is important to be aware they can – and do – occur. Therefore, it is important, for you and the ongoing success of your organisation to know what can happen, then be prepared for any eventuality.