Getting Started Tool
Starting a not-for-profit organisation but not sure where to begin? We're here to help. Our tool will guide your new community group through key legal decisions.
Use our tool
Our Getting Started Tool will help you work out:
Should you incorporate or remain unincorporated?
Deciding whether to incorporate is an important decision. While incorporation has many beneficial legal consequences, incorporation also brings responsibilities.
If you incorporate, which legal structure should you choose?
If your group has decided to incorporate, you’ll need to consider which incorporated legal structure will best suit your organisation’s aims, activities and culture.
Is your group eligible to register as a charity with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC)?
An organisation is a ‘registered charity’ if it is registered with the ACNC. Our tool will help you determine if your group is eligible to apply.
You can use this tool alongside our other online resources on Getting Started, including fact sheets, checklists and guides, that will tell you more about key decisions you’ll need to make.
What to expect
Our tool will ask you a series of questions about key decisions about your new organisation – in plain and simple English – and will provide you with information to help you answer these questions. At the end of the tool, you’ll be able to download a summary of the information given.
Easy to understand
Our tool is written in plain language and will help make sense of complex laws.
Free to use
We know how costly legal information can be. That’s why we’ve created this free tool – to help your organisation get started.
Additional resources
We have included links to other resources and to where you can get more free help, as well as clear steps of what to do next.
Why it’s important to understand the legal issues
The not-for-profit sector faces unique legal issues. That’s why we’ve designed our online resources to help you navigate the key legal questions. Our resources provide legal information tailored to the not-for-profit sector.
Getting these issues right at the start will save time, money, administrative headaches and possible legal difficulties for your organisation down the track.
About us
Justice Connect’s Not-for-profit Law program is a national legal service, offering free and affordable legal supports for not-for-profit organisations and social enterprises.
We’re a charity ourselves, with over 10 years’ experience, so we understand the context in which not-for-profit organisations operate. For some organisations, complying with complex laws can be daunting. For others, it is prohibitively expensive. That’s why we provide timely and appropriate legal support – to help community organisations make sense of the law, stay legally compliant, thrive within complexity, and achieve good governance.