Question

As both club runner and my rotary are up to date with the current president and secretary details why are the insurance emails going to the wrong address?

Answer

Insurance information has to be declared.

The process (at present – there are plans to improve) is to request a list of the Club officer nominated to declare from the District secretaries in September. That list is then imported into the insurance programme set up by October so the request can be issued for completion/update in November. That information is complied by the system in November and sent to the insurance broker AON for their work with the insurer on rates and terms for the next year.

The reason why this process has been adopted is because the insurance team needs to have the required information about all clubs to ensure that the Clubs, the Club trusts, the Club officers and the Club trustees are covered by the insurance master policies.

While your Club has updated records in Clubrunner and my rotary some Districts and/or Club do not use Clubrunner and have not updated their information. Furthermore the insurance team does not have access to the District or clubs records to update from that data. We have the added complication of the new Regional Community groups in in Oceania those are now being run in languages other than English.

Returning to the why? The most important information required by any insurer is on potential claims and potential issues for the insured organisations survival.

In the information sheet there is a section that enables the Club to enter any disputes that might give rise to a claim. These are referred to as ‘Notifications’. The Club officer delegated to complete at the end of the process confirms that they have made ‘due enquiry’ about any potential claims. This is standard in all liability insurance policies. The reason is that in setting the terms the broker and insurer need to know what might need to be considered in the insurance policy year. This is no just about premiums, in fact it is more about ensuring that the risk of the claim is fully understood and, if thought necessary, there may be specific requirements of the insured organisation to supply further information etc.

The other issues often relate to very specific upcoming requirements of the insured. In 2025 we are in such a situation as all our Clubs that are in New Zealand need to re-register with Incorporated Societies early 2026. If this is not done then the society (Club) will be automatically de-registered. The club may still exist but it will not be ‘incorporated” and only incorporated entities are covered by our master policy.

Again why? This is because to insurer an unincorporated group is to insure each individual in that group with no protection for any individual by having an incorporated entity as the ‘trading’ or active public party. Simply even if we could get cover for such a group of individuals, the administration would be huge and the cost instead for insuring one incorporated entity to a group of individuals would be many times the cost of the premiums we are now paying.

How is this planned to be better going forward?

First, the requirements for information change because risk changes.

The insurer may want different questions answered. There are good reasons for this which is a standard process for renewal, especially in master policies. For the Rotary insurance team our objective is to either enable prior years information to be simply confirmed as unchanged (e.g the insurance history) or, if a question is no longer required, deleted.

Subject to finance, as there will be more work and cost, the plan is to have a separate update process triggered in July. The last Club insurance officer will be invited to login and confirm their willingness to continue their role with a simple YES/NO.

If Club insurance officer does not want to continue, a NO, the system will invite the current officer to enter in their successor.

If NO successor entered, the system will ask the current officer to enter in the name of the Club President/Treasurer/Secretary.

Nulls (no information) will need to be allowed.

If the current officer provides alternate contacts such as the President or a new nominated insurance officer, then the system will advise them of the retirement of the prior year officer (who will no longer get reminders) and ask the officer(s) to confirm who is to provide information for the next renewal.

If there is no information entered at all (a NULL) the insurance team will be notified and the appropriate leadership contacted for an update.

Again thanks to this question, we hope that this article will assist in understanding the insurance process and how it is evolving.