The Governance Self-Assessment Every Sport Organisation Should Run

Here is a question I ask every sport organisation I work with: when did you last sit down as a board and honestly assess how well you are governed?

The answer is almost always never.

Not because they do not care. Because it has never occurred to them. Governance is something they do - hold an AGM, present the financials, elect the committee. It is not something they evaluate. The mechanic services the car but never inspects the workshop.

The Good Governance in Grassroots Sport project, a collaboration between ISCA and Transparency International Germany, developed a self-assessment tool specifically for this purpose. Chapter 10 of their guidelines lays out a framework that any sport organisation - from a local club to a national federation - can use to evaluate its own governance. It does not require consultants. It does not require a governance qualification. It requires 90 minutes, a whiteboard, and a willingness to be honest.

Why self-assessment matters

Jean Camy of the University of Lyon, one of the contributors to the ISCA project, made a point that has stayed with me. He described the vision and mission of a sport organisation as its compass - the thing that tells you whether you are heading in the right direction. A self-assessment is checking the compass.

Without it, you are navigating by feel. And feel is unreliable. A committee that has been running a club for a decade can easily believe it is well-governed because things are working. Members are renewing. Events are happening. The financials are positive. But "things are working" is not the same as "things are well-governed." A club can be operationally successful and governance-poor for years - until the one incident that reveals the gaps. A safeguarding failure. A financial irregularity. A constitutional dispute that the committee has no process to resolve.

The assessment does not prevent those incidents. But it shows you where you are vulnerable before the incident forces you to find out.

The four pillars

The ISCA self-assessment is structured around four governance principles. Under each, there are specific questions - not theoretical questions about ideals, but practical questions about what your organisation actually does.

Democracy

Democracy in a sport organisation is not just elections. It is whether members have genuine influence over how the organisation is run.

Start with these questions. Not all of them - pick the ones that feel uncomfortable. Those are the ones that matter.

Can any financial member stand for election to the board? Or are there informal barriers - unwritten expectations about who is "suitable"? When did you last have a contested election? If every board position is filled by acclamation year after year, that is not a healthy democracy. It is an oligarchy that nobody has noticed.

How do members participate in decisions between AGMs? If the only mechanism for member input is the annual general meeting, then members have influence for two hours a year. Is there a mechanism for members to raise issues, propose changes, or challenge decisions outside of that window?

When did you last review your election process? Constitutions are written once and amended reluctantly. The election process described in your constitution may not reflect how elections actually happen. Is the process genuinely accessible? Are nominations publicised widely enough? Is the timeline reasonable?

Does the board actively seek new voices, or does it recruit from the same circle? Patrick McGrattan of Belfast City Council, contributing to the ISCA research, made the point that governance assessment should look at the whole board as a system - not just individual roles. A board where everyone comes from the same background, the same age group, the same professional context is not well-governed regardless of how competent the individuals are.

Accountability

Accountability means decisions can be traced to the people who made them, and those people can explain why.

Does every board member know what they are specifically responsible for? Not in general terms - "the treasurer handles money" - but in specific terms. Is there a written description of each role's responsibilities? When did you last review it?

Are committee meeting minutes taken, approved, and accessible to members? Not just taken - accessible. Minutes that sit on the secretary's laptop do nobody any good. Can a member who was not at the meeting find out what was decided?

When a decision is made, is the reasoning documented? Not just the outcome - "the board approved the expenditure" - but the reasoning. Why was this amount appropriate? What alternatives were considered? This matters when decisions are later questioned, and in a volunteer organisation, they will be.

Is there a clear process for what happens when something goes wrong? If a volunteer breaches the code of conduct, who investigates? What are the possible outcomes? Is the process documented, or does the committee make it up each time?

Transparency

Transparency is whether information flows to the people who need it.

Are your financials published to members? Not just presented at the AGM in a 30-second summary - published. Can a member see the income and expenditure statement? The balance sheet? The bank reconciliation? If the answer is "they can ask the treasurer," that is not transparency. That is information available on request, which is a different thing entirely.

Is your strategic plan or annual plan available to members? Do they know what the board is working towards? Can they see the priorities, the timeline, the budget allocation?

Are your policies accessible? Not buried in a shared drive or filed in a cabinet in the clubhouse. Actually accessible - on the website, in a member portal, somewhere a new member can find them without asking.

When was the last time you proactively shared information with members that you were not required to share? Transparency is not about meeting minimum disclosure requirements. It is about a culture where sharing information is the default, not the exception.

Inclusion

Inclusion is whether the people affected by decisions have a voice in making them.

Who is missing from the table? Look at your board. Look at your membership. Do they look the same? If your membership is 40% women and your board is 100% men, you have an inclusion problem regardless of how well-intentioned the board is. If your membership includes juniors but your board has never consulted a parent, you have an inclusion problem.

When did you last ask stakeholders - members, coaches, volunteers, parents, local community - what they think? Not in a general sense. A specific survey, a feedback mechanism, a consultation process. If the answer is never, then the board is governing on assumption rather than information.

Do your meeting times, locations, and formats exclude anyone? A committee meeting at 7pm on a Wednesday at the clubhouse excludes parents with young children, shift workers, members who live far from the venue, and anyone without transport. Have you considered alternatives?

The implementation questions

Beyond the four pillars, the ISCA framework includes questions about the practical infrastructure of governance.

Do you have an ethics code? Not a constitution - an ethics code that describes the behaviour expected of committee members, coaches, volunteers, and members. Is it current? Has it been reviewed in the last two years?

Do you have a risk register? A document that identifies the risks facing the organisation and the measures in place to manage them. Most clubs do not. Most clubs that do have not updated theirs since it was written.

Do you have a conflict of interest policy? And - this is the real question - has it ever been used? A policy that exists but has never resulted in a declaration is not a functioning policy.

Do you have a whistleblowing channel? A mechanism for members to raise concerns confidentially. Not "email the chair." A proper channel with independence, confidentiality, and defined response timeframes.

Do you have a succession plan? What happens when the president steps down? When the treasurer moves away? When the secretary gets a new job and can no longer volunteer? If the answer is "we'll figure it out," that is not a plan.

How to actually do it

Block 90 minutes at a board meeting. Not at the end - at the start, when people are fresh.

Put the four pillars on a whiteboard. Under each, list the questions that feel most relevant to your organisation. You do not need to cover everything. Pick the areas where you suspect gaps exist.

For each question, the board discusses and rates honestly: are we doing this well, doing it partially, or not doing it at all? No scoring system needed. The conversation matters more than the score.

At the end, you will have a list of gaps. Prioritise them. Not everything needs to be fixed immediately. Some gaps are urgent - no safeguarding policy, no financial controls, no conflict of interest process. Some are important but not urgent - succession planning, stakeholder consultation, board diversity. Some are aspirational - proactive transparency, member engagement beyond the AGM.

The output is a governance improvement plan. Four or five specific actions. Each with an owner and a deadline. Review it at the next meeting. That is it.

The funded-body context

If your organisation receives public funding, this is not optional.

Sport England's Code for Sports Governance requires funded organisations to meet specific governance standards, including board diversity targets, financial transparency requirements, and safeguarding obligations. Self-assessment against these standards is part of the compliance framework.

UK Sport has similar requirements for organisations receiving elite funding. The governance requirements are detailed, specific, and audited.

In Australia, Sport Integrity Australia's National Integrity Framework includes governance standards that funded national sporting organisations must meet. State bodies have their own compliance requirements that flow down to affiliated clubs.

Even if your organisation is not currently funded, running a self-assessment against these frameworks is useful. It shows you where you stand relative to the standard that funders will expect if you apply for grants in the future. And increasingly, local government grants - not just state and national funding - are requiring governance assurances.

Running it across a federation

For a single club, the self-assessment is a board conversation. For a federation with 50 or 200 or 400 clubs, it becomes something much more powerful.

Imagine every club in your federation running this assessment simultaneously. Each club identifies its own gaps. The federation aggregates the results. Suddenly, you can see system-wide patterns. Seventy percent of your clubs have no conflict of interest policy. Half have no whistleblowing channel. Only a quarter have done any succession planning.

That information changes the conversation. Instead of guessing where to direct resources, the federation knows. Instead of sending generic governance guidance to every club, the federation can target support where it is needed.

This is what TidyConnect makes possible at scale. A governing body can distribute the self-assessment to every affiliated club, track completion, and aggregate results into a federation-wide governance dashboard. The clubs that need support are visible. The gaps that are systemic are identifiable. The progress over time is measurable.

Patrick McGrattan's point about looking at the whole board - not individual roles - applies at the federation level too. You cannot understand the governance health of a federation by looking at individual clubs in isolation. You need the system view.

The honest conversation

The hardest part of a self-assessment is not the framework. It is the honesty.

Boards are social groups. They have relationships, loyalties, shared history. Admitting that the organisation has governance gaps can feel like criticising the people who have been running it - who are, in most cases, volunteers giving up their free time.

This is why framing matters. The self-assessment is not an audit. It is not a performance review of the committee. It is a health check of the organisation. A doctor checking your blood pressure is not criticising your lifestyle. They are giving you information so you can make better decisions.

The board that can sit down and say "we are doing this well, we are not doing this well, and here is what we need to improve" is a board that is already better governed than most. Because the willingness to ask the question honestly is the foundation everything else is built on.

Run the assessment. Be honest about what you find. Fix the urgent gaps. Plan for the rest. Review annually.

Your governance is only as good as your willingness to look at it clearly.

References

• ISCA & Transparency International Germany. Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport (PDF). Chapter 10: Self-Assessment.
• Sport England & UK Sport. A Code for Sports Governance.
• NCVO. Governance Guidance. Board self-assessment.
• ACNC. Governance Hub. Australian governance standards.
• BoardSource. BoardSource. Board self-assessment tools.
• Institute of Directors. IoD. Board effectiveness reviews.