After about a year dealing with a non-profit sector, I've learned quite a few things: * Your long-term plans are supported by short-term funding * Planning anything is excruciatingly difficult * You can't effectively diversify * Everybody checks on everything * Nobody understands what you are doing * And nobody on the internet likes you
Short-term thinking
Neither foundations nor state actors are willing to grant you money for more than a year or two. That effectively means that every year you are trying to convince someone that they want to support activities, targeting usually people they do not know.
Say you provide a social service. You are trying to help the poor. You are "selling" the idea to rich foundations where the donors have absolutely no idea what is needed to do. Getting government funds is even trickier - you learn about an opportunity one month, have to submit a proposal the next month and pray that you will get some. Oh, and do not expect donors to understand, why you need to pay your people well.
Planning
But on the other hand, you need to have a long term strategy. Your core employees need paying, your offices aren't rent-free, your goals do not disappear overnight just because a project funded by government ended. You actually need those people to write up a new proposal to get someone else to pay for your continued mission.
The trouble with planning is, your short-term projects end, you have no idea if any other funding will be available and yet you need to make hiring/promoting and investment decision. You feel obligations to your employees and to your clients, who - if you can't find new funding - will lose service they might rely on.
Diversification
There is a limit to diversification. In a company, this limit is based on how many customers can you satisfy - sure, your factory floor might be a limiting factor on number of customers, so is the number of your employees, but essentially everything is scalable. Not so much with fundraising. There is a limit to how many project proposal you are permitted to submit. There is a limit on how much money you can get from a grant scheme. And there is a limit on how many meetings your board can take to convince a rich donor to add you to their philanthropic portfolio.
You get money from state and local governments, from intergovernmental organisations like EU or UN and from private foundations. All are limiting, prepared to donate only to selected causes and sometimes change mind. And you can't just diversify to "a new product" without compromising your very mission and a reason for your existence.
Bureaucracy and admin
Don't let me started on bureaucracy. As an accountant, I don't mind paperwork. It's how you code and catalogue information. However, when you have to report every penny and explain every dollar, the paperwork starts to be meaningless.
And the funny thing is, you send a report and you get back some questions. So you answer those questions and get sent more. And more. And payments are delayed for that, especially when talking about government money.
Nobody likes you
Internet is sometimes an awful place and if you mention working for a non-profit you learn a lot about yourself. Funnily enough, there are people, who will deride you for not working for monetary incentives. And people who will be angry you actually get paid for your work. If you get government funding, you are stealing working people money. If you are fully dependent on private foundations, you are just a corporate sell-out masquerading as do-gooder for rich people PR. You can't win on the internet.
And sometimes people just think that because you are working for a non-profit, you couldn't make it in a for-profit company. So just to clarify: there is no inherent difference in working for non-profit and for-profit, unless your expertise is related to the very few differences
Non-profit companies can't make a profit, they have reserve funds. Seems like semantics, but because you can't redistribute those reserves to shareholders (de iure there are none, although you could argue statutory representatives acts as an owner), there is no equity and therefore no profits to share. There are different accounting methods in some cases and there is a different "sales job", as it were. Usually, the main bulk of the operating capital doesn't come from clients benefiting from the services rendered. Other than that, the jobs are the same and the people come from the same job market.