I’m the system admin of a non profit myself. Honestly there’s a lot more we can do to cut cost. But theres a cost in cutting cost.

For example. Sometime prior to COVID, and prior to me working there, my organization needed a “common digital service” (being purposely vague here for privacy). In order to build oversight reports to our ministry we needed a separate reporting service so the ministry could get the data they wanted in order to keep paying us. We also then needed a third service to store all the data since the other 2 didn’t want to do that part.

So our “Common digital service” was now composed of 3 systems. Issues grew pretty quickly after the initial set up. Despite these systems being “partners” every time an issue came up they’d endlessly blame each other and refuse to fix the cause of the issue. They would offer to correct the data for a fee. Since we were legally mandated to maintain the data they’d often pay the fees. It was like these big companies came along, and collaborated a scheme to extort money out of this non profit. No one there was tech savvy enough to notice.

When I came there I figured this out. Mostly because I was previously employed at one of the companies involved. Legal action wasn’t an option. But I found a company that does all three parts of the system. They can’t do the blame loop thing and they were way cheaper overall. Easy fix right? Nope.

As a non profit we are required to hire a third party requisition organization. The process of even getting the new system contract took well over a year. This is required so non profits don’t just take bribes and such.

Then comes migration. The slow process of taking data from system A and putting it on system B. They used very different structures so it was a lot of manual work for a small team. We can’t just hire new people or even temp staff so it’s tonnes of overtime.

So consider all the extra cost in this story, things moved way slower, extra services had to be hired, overtime had to be paid. It is a lot of bureaucratic stuff that private companies don’t have to deal with. But that extra cost is the cost of preventing corruption. The only way we could fix the broken system was to get a huge initial investment from the ministry to fix things.

I’m saying I agree or disagree with this but that’s how things work. And if an organization is dependent on donations alone it’s probably got a lot of overhead like this. Things they cant fix untill they can afford to fix them.

Not my idea. But happy to spread it.