Organisational Resilience Check

Any type of conservation non-profit organisation (NGO) can use and adapt this tool whether small or large, growing or well-established.

The Organisational Resilience Check is intended to support your organisation understand both its strengths and areas to strengthen. Strengthening your organisation’s effectiveness and resilience will allow you to achieve and build on your conservation goals, maximising your impact.

Download the full Organisational Resilience Check
Download a simpler version for smaller organisations

The Tool Structure

No organisation is perfect! The purpose of this tool is not to ‘score’ 100% in everything. It is to prompt discussion and support planning for how and where to continue strengthening. If your organisation works well, then there is a greater chance that you will deliver effective biodiversity conservation.

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.

Tab 1: Guidance

Find out more about how to use the tool (also see below).

Tab 2: Resilience Tool

Score your organisation against a series of statements. Decide whether your organisation is ‘Not there’, ‘Getting there’, ‘Good’ or that the statement is ‘Not Applicable’. For each theme, there is also space to note ‘key takeaways’ from your individual thought process, or from group discussions.

Tab 3: Examples

To give more insight into some of the terminology used.

Tab 4: Summary

Where your responses will be automatically averaged for each theme, along with any notes you have written in the ‘key takeaway’ space.

Steps and Tips for Using This Tool

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.

However, 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 do 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.

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, and staff members involved in fundraising. When discussing internal communication, you may want to involve everyone in the organisation.

In the assessment, you will be asked to consider a range of statements and choose a rating for 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.

Note: You can adapt this tool to your context by choosing ‘Not Applicable’ or by skipping themes. To add statements, we recommend adding them to the middle of a sub-theme, so the formulas are automatically included. Or, you can select ‘Format’ and ‘Unprotect Sheet’ to make more significant edits.

Your organisation can provide ratings on each statement in different ways – through group discussion and rating, through each staff member individually rating each statement, or a mix.

More sensitive questions, such as those under the Leadership & Management theme, may be best answered individually and anonymously so people feel comfortable answering honestly. If answers are given anonymously, think about how you’ll bring everyone’s answers together to understand the organisation as a whole.

Or you may wish to discuss each question as a group before scoring. This allows everyone to hear each others’ perspective and contribute their own ideas.


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

Regardless of how scoring is done, we recommend always having a facilitated discussion to bring everyone’s perspectives together. These discussions are often just as valuable, or more valuable, than the numbers resulting from the assessment.

Use the discussion and your assessment results to make an Organisational Development Plan.