Risk is a complex and inevitable phenomenon in every human activity. Without risk, there would be no sport. However, in sport, risk can be reduced by establishing a better organization, improving policies and processes, continuous training and education, and utilizing technology. These efforts are known as risk management. The practice of identifying, evaluating, and mitigating risks enables the delivery of quality sport programming now and in the long term. Sport leaders in Canada and across the world have witnessed the rise of Safe Sport standards over recent years with NSO’s and PSO’s committing to enacting pro-active policies and processes to minimize risk. During this time, Interpodia has collaborated with NSO’s of different sports and sizes and developing our sport management software to support consistent, sport-specific, and integrated risk management processes. Particularly around membership registration and management, coach and official tracking and licensing, and event registration and sanctioning. To further our expertise in risk management, in January 2020, we announced our official partnership with Markel Canada.

Markel Canada is a leading insurer in sport and leisure and through our partnership we aim to help our National and Provincial Sport Organization (NSO/PSO) clients in reducing, transferring or avoiding risks where appropriate. Interpodia’s expertise in registration, membership, and coach & official licensing lead us to focus on operational and compliance risks for sport organizations. Operational risks primarily include the areas of coach, official and athlete management; management of donations and volunteers; organizational capacity to meet stakeholder expectations; and waiver collection and management. Whereas compliance risks relate to failure to comply with existing laws and policies of governing and funding and insuring bodies.

With this focus in mind we collaborated with our partners at Markel and used our combined expertise and best practices to create a risk management audit worksheet for sport organizations. By working through this audit, we hope organizations gain insight into several scenarios that may present risk in their organization’s registration and waiver collection process and also their process around coach & official licensing. Implementing risk management strategies is an activity that requires continuous processing and therefore, we recommend revisiting this worksheet several times a year. Download the audit by clicking the button below and fill it out with your team or stakeholders.

To help mitigate the risks  outlined in the scenarios above, our technology was developed with best practices in mind, focusing on three very important aspects.

Integration- Integrations with education and background check systems and between sport organizations to ensure clean and accurate data for the sport.

Automation- Automating verification, approval processes, alerts and warnings for expiry dates approaching, removing human error and increasing compliance.

Transparency- Data, waivers, and  financials available and easily accessible at the right levels of the sport and safely stored.