Help centre / Risks, policies & compliance / Adopt a policy properly
Adopt a policy properly
Draft the policy (or start from a template), submit it for review, then table it for adoption. Your trustees carry the decision at a meeting, and only then does the policy show as adopted. Nothing counts as adopted until the board decides.
A policy isn't really your charity's policy until the trustees have adopted it. The Policy library walks each policy through that journey: draft, submit for review, table for adoption, adopted. You can see the stage of every policy at a glance, and nothing is final until your board decides.
Take a policy to adoption
- Go to Governance, then Policy library.
- Add a policy. Choose New policy to start from scratch, or pick one from the template library with Add draft. Templates arrive sized for your charity, with your charity's name already filled in.
- Choose Start the draft and write or edit the policy. Your work saves as you type, so you can safely leave and come back. The library shows "draft in progress" until you submit it.
- When it reads well, submit it for review. This publishes it as a numbered version for the board to see.
- Choose Table for adoption. This raises the policy as a formal decision for your trustees.
- At the meeting, the board votes and the decision is recorded. When the motion is carried, the policy's status becomes Adopted automatically.
- Ask trustees, staff and volunteers to open the policy and choose I have read & acknowledge. Each sign-off is recorded against that version, with a name and date.
What happens next
Each policy carries a review interval and a Next review date. When that date passes, the policy is flagged as overdue in the library, so nothing quietly goes stale. To update a policy later, start a new draft: the old versions are all kept, and the board adopts the new version the same way.
Common questions
Can I just mark a policy as adopted? No, and that's deliberate. A policy's status follows its lifecycle. Adoption is a trustee decision recorded at a meeting, which is what the Charity Commission expects. See motions and voting.
What if a decision is already open? A policy can only have one decision tabled at a time. Record that decision before raising another.
Do sign-offs carry over to new versions? No. When you adopt a new version, people acknowledge that version afresh, so you always know who has read the current wording.