Very true. I've been running non-profits to help the security of journalists and human rights defenders for years (https://www.secfirst.org https://www.secfirst

Very true. I've been running non-profits to help the security of journalists and human rights defenders for years (https://www.secfirst.org https://www.secfirst.org). One of the big issues is that donors often only want to fund projects which means core costs (accounting, IT or whatever) often are not covered or are only partly covered. To an extent project specific funding also means that some organisations have to make sacrifices or do projects that aren't central to their mission. Mission creep can happen with some NGOs. Without core costs covered it's also a lot harder to develop new concepts as there isn't really much room essentially for R&D. Core costs in general also become a bit of a barrier to entry for new non-profit ideas and organisations. Core costs usually are only granted by big donors and usually will only be granted to big organisations. It's very very hard as a small org to get core costs paid for so it's hard to scale a lot of things. Collaboration in the NGO field is very varied, a lot of big orgs talk about it but when it comes down to it, often are very lacking. This leads to lots of inefficiency, overlap and duplication. Also the project based funding tends much more towards new ideas rather than maintenance. Maintenance and sustaining projects just doesn't get the same level of funding. For example we built our open source Umbrella App for learning about security with project specific funding. Nearly all of which gets spent specifically on that project. It's very hard for us to find donors willing to fund the ongoing maintenance of the apps. The rest of our core costs has to come from our training and consultancy work with organisations. That's tricky as we love doing it but it means we can't focus as much on our core tool building. Because of the core cost issues, the non-profit space is often very inefficient. It doesn't really have the same culture of startup, mergers, takeovers etc. To extent what you often get is zombie NGOs which become big and inefficient but soak up the donor money and keep smaller/better organisations out of the market. The way big donors work, many are very slow and risk adverse. So that means for example a lot of the big funders will never find any organisation that hasn't been around for at least three to five years. Imagine a VC not finding any company that hasn't been around for more than three to five years!