Organisational Resilience Check Guidance

The organisational resilience check helps you identify strengths and areas to develop in your organisation, so you can prioritise what to focus on next. Strengthening your organisation’s effectiveness and resilience will allow you to achieve and build on your conservation goals, maximising your impact.

The organisational resilience check has statements under 12 themes, which reflect international aspirations for institutional capacity and resilience. Each of these themes is relevant to almost all organisations in some way, although some may be more important to your organisation than others.

The 12 themes are:

1. Organisational Planning and Management
2. Crisis preparation and response
3. Leadership and Management
4. Governance
5. Human Resources and Volunteer Management
6. Internal Communications
7. Funding
8. Finance Management
9. Project Lifecycle
10. Organisational Learning
11. External Communications
12. Partnerships and Networks

More information about what each of these sections represents can be found under the ‘Themes’ webpage.

Before you begin

1. Decide which sections to complete

If you decide to do a full organisational resilience check, you will probably answer all the questions in all 12 themes.

If you have already identified some priorities, it may be better for you to focus only on the themes related to those priorities.

If you choose to focus on one theme, remember that developing one area of your organisation will always affect other areas.

For example, if you develop your fundraising, you may find that the financial management system is unable to keep up with the new income, and that the human resource structures are not able to deliver all of the new work. So, you may want to complete other themes that are closely related to your chosen theme.

2. Who to involve

We recommend that you involve people who work in each area of the organisation. Different people may have different perspectives on the same issue. Hearing different views will enrich your understanding of your organisation. Many of the themes will need input from most people working for the organisation.

For example: When reviewing the finance management theme, include the finance manager, finance administrator, staff members that manage budgets, or staff members involved in fundraising. When discussing internal communication, you may want to involve everyone in the organisation.

3. How to answer the questions

Often, it is better to discuss each question as a group before answering. This allows everyone to hear each others’ perspective and contribute their own ideas. Alternatively, each person could fill out an assessment on their own, and then discuss the results together as a group.

These discussions are often just as valuable, or more valuable, than the number results from this assessment.

If multiple people in the organisation fill out the assessment, you will be able to see everyone’s merged scores on the ‘Results’ tab of your assessment.

Key tip: Make sure that the people who will be affected by any changes are able to participate and offer their perspectives.

In the assessment, you will be asked to consider a range of statements and tick a box to rate the organisation on those statements. Spend time thinking about your answers and be able to explain why you give the answer you do. Base answers on your own experiences of what happens in practice.

For example: If you select ‘Good’ in response to ‘The organisation has clear and transparent processes for escalating information about risks and decisions along line management’, why do you think it’s ‘Good’? Does your organisation have this process written down as a policy for all staff to access in a clear and transparent way? Does everyone understand how they fit into risk management processes?

What the ratings mean: You can select one of four different answers to each of the statements.

• ‘Not there’ means that your organisation hasn’t started or has just started considering this topic.
• ‘Getting there’ means your organisation has started considering this topic, and sometimes does it or does part of it.
• ‘Good’ means your organisation is doing a good job in this topic, and you fully agree with the statement as it applies to your organisation.
• ‘Not applicable’ means that this statement does not currently apply to your organisation.

Please remember that there is no incorrect answer. Your responses will help you understand where to focus efforts to strengthen your organisation and its resilience. You can look at the numerical ‘scores’ on the Results page if you find them helpful, but you can also focus on the discussion. Both the discussions and the results are a starting point for deciding priorities and planning how to continue to strengthen your organisation.