Giving Compass' Take:

• Ingrid Srinath underlines why NGOs and businesses are different and how both entities are unable to operate in a similar fashion but should focus on collaboration because it could help advance societal progress. 

• Is a B Corporation or social enterprise an example of fusing together a business and NGO?

• Read the investor's guide to B Corps and Benefit Corporations to learn more about these types of organizations. 

How often have you heard that nonprofits need to be “more business like”? Or witnessed the awe that greets people who cross over from the private sector to a job in an NGO? Despite the global financial meltdown, relentless reports of corporate malfeasance and catastrophic breakdowns in governance at some of the most respected businesses, the corporate sector is continually held up as a model of efficiency, effectiveness, leadership and innovation to the nonprofit sector in India and around the world.

If only, we are told, we would adopt ‘corporate best practices’ in strategy, systems, structure, skills, staffing, governance and, increasingly, even style, we might finally break out of the mindsets that keep too many NGOs small, slow and starving. With corporate support promising volumes of new resources, NGOs across India are scrambling to acquire the board members, metrics, skills and language that will, they hope, unlock their slice of the CSR pie.

As I never tire of preaching: Nonprofit is a tax status, not a business plan. Nonprofits could also do well to emulate the ambition and agility that 21st century businesses demonstrate. It is as vital, however, that we recognize the limitations of business thinking and fully appreciate the value of much nonprofit expertise.

Increasingly, I find the nonprofit sector polarised between those who espouse the corporate world-view and those that reject it in every form. Not only do these two groups seldom interact, each appears to hold the other in utter disdain. The schism obviates any possibility of combining forces or of cross-fertilizing ideas and values.

Read the full article about NGOs and businesses by Ingrid Srinath at India Development Review (IDR)