Risk management

This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.

This video gives an overview of how to do risk management in a service, if you’re a trust fundraiser:

That’s an explanation of the basic principles. The following are a few further notes about details:

• The internal and external risks you’re looking for are normally risks of not getting to the outcomes, plus other key risks (such as around safeguarding).
• High/medium/low graded risks, combining likelihood and degree of impact: You might say that high risks are intolerable, low risks are acceptable but will be monitored and medium risks are actively managed.
• Monitoring and evaluating risks: if you get onto this, a classic tool used is a risk register, where you record details of the risk event that has been observed. You might mention that the risks will be reviewed as they occur and again as part of the evaluation cycle on the project.
• If you want to talk about your plan to mitigate (handle, trying to reduce) the risk, this is normally the order of preferred options:
  • Eliminate the risk
  • Make it less likely to occur
  • Ensure a less severe impact if it happens
  • Transfer risk to someone else (sometimes possible – e.g., insurance)
  • Contingency plan for if the risk occurs
  • Accept the risk, if level of threat is small enough
• If you have any very significant risks, you might look at something called the “bowtie” approach”. This is too much detail normally, especially given that risk management doesn’t come up that often, but it’s an impressive tool to wheel out in this difficult situation.
• It might (or might not) be useful to highlight that some risks you accept because you are looking for the reward that only comes if you take the risk – it’s a trade-off.

A last little point to justify all this. There’s supposed to be good evidence from business research that projects with active risk management approaches deliver more successfully than those that just wait for risks to happen and then deal with them. So, you’re not wasting everyone’s time with paperwork!

Further Reading

If you need to be great at it, the book Identifying and Managing Project Risk by Tom Kendrick, looks great. It’s probably a bit too specialised, but if there’s demand from subscribers then once I’ve read it properly, I might significantly expand this section.

The book by Dr Jen Shang that I reference is: Fundraising: Principles and Practice by Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang (who’s the psychology expert, I think).