Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience

5Create Your Risk Register

PAUSE AND LOOK at your progress:

• You have a greater understanding of the role of nonprofits in their communities.
• You have reflected on the challenges of the nonprofit model and realized that you are not alone in being worried and sometimes distracted by the burdens you face.
• You have learned a basic vocabulary for risk management.
• You have learned how to perform an initial risk inventory, which will provide you with greater awareness and peace of mind about your organization’s current needs.
• You have learned a simple process of prioritizing those risks with the input of your team.

This is huge! If you never read another word in this book, you have achieved a tremendous amount!

But more value awaits. You are ready to create your organization’s first risk register—one of the simplest and most powerful tools of risk management. This chapter will explain how.

The Risk Register Is the Key Tool of Lean Risk Management

A risk register is the foundational accountability tool for successful Lean Risk Management and resilience. It is a dynamic list of your nonprofit organization’s top potential risks, both threats and opportunities. It provides an up‐to‐date description of how each risk is defined, who is responsible, what the next step is, and when that step should be completed.

A risk register is critical for effective Lean Risk Management because it is both an overview of your risk profile and a tool for managing those risks. Without a risk register, ...