Risk map

You’ve referred to risks throughout the business plan – you can summarise them here.

If you’re a charity, it’s your trustees’ responsibility to make sure that risks to the organisation are identified and managed. Risk mapping is a useful exercise and easy to do with your board or management team using a flip chart and some pens. You can also use our risk register template.

You could include a full risk register in an appendix.

Set out your main risks in a table

Try to think about risk across everything that you do, including:

• governance risks, eg conflicts of interest, failure of leadership
• external risks, eg changes to the policy environment, a public complaint or bad press coverage
• regulatory or compliance risks, eg failure to meet necessary standards
• financial risks, eg loss of major income source
• operational risks, eg loss of key staff, poor quality of support given to vulnerable beneficiaries, failure to deliver products on time.

For each risk, decide how likely it is to happen, what impact it will have on your organisation and what you can do to reduce or manage the risk.

If you’re sharing your business plan externally, include a contact for enquiries.