Often change needs to be forced.  There needs to be a burning platform underneath us to compel us to jump. Otherwise it’s all too easy to just stand there, like we always have.  This is why in North America, non-profit making organisatons are coming together to combine their finance functions.

Seattle is the scene for this ‘Shared Services Coalition’ and is led by the Hearing, Speech and Deafness Center and who are banding together FareStart, Northwest Harvest, Little Bit Therapeautic Riding, Provail and Executive Alliance.

Of course there are the substantial savings that come from economies of scale.  Simply through centralising the accounts payable process, for example, should save each organisation a pretty penny.  However, it will be interesting to see if they apply true shared services and aggregate systems, charge each ‘customer’ according to services consumed, run as a business, and focus on service delivery.

We are seeing non profit organsations closing down, as the first direct debit transaction to stop in a recession is charitable donations.  It’s so easy to think of Kennedy’s words of ‘fix your roof in the sunshine’, but we are all guilty of not doing this.  It will be interesting to see how the model develops here and how the Private sector (where this coalition model doesn’t really exist) may get to learn something from the innovations of the not-for-profit or public sector.