Can a merger boost your nonprofit?

With more and more charities applying for recognition every day, an interesting trend out of the grantmaking world is the encouragement of collaborative work and even mergers. This makes a lot of sense on the macro level... why have multiple organizations doing the exact same work, only to spend a portion out of each group on non-programming needs like overhead and administrative costs? If these costs are centralized or shared, there should be more money available for program work. Now, the devil's in the details... sometimes collaborative work loses efficiency because there are too many decision-makers, so the gains in merged efforts are (sometimes) lost. Still, it's an interesting trend. Check out today's Poughkeepsie Journal for an interesting article on the trend in upstate NY.