Term paper on Industry and competitor analysis

Costs and efficiencies

For NGOs, costs can be measured as the price paid for their services and funds spend on program implementation during a given period of time, and the efficiency of an NGO can be evaluated according to several criteria, such as the amount of funding received in the current year, dynamics compared to the previous year, the number of people helped, funds spent on helping a single individual, and the amount of funds spend on the provision of services compared to the amount of funding spend on the needs of the organization.

With regard to cost effectiveness, dynamics of funding and market share as well as the number of people helped and the number of countries where the organization is providing its services. At the same time, the goals of all considered competing NGOs are different and thus they focus on different countries and events, which makes the evaluation of efficiency quite subjective.

In this paper, the effectiveness will be evaluated basing on the dynamics of funding, number of countries served and number of people helped. According to Table 3, the leader is “Save the Children”, which managed to help 64 million children and operates in 120 countries. Its revenues have slightly increased in 2010, but there was no significant trend for the growth of funding. At the same time, the funding of ACF International, the second leader according to the above-mentioned criteria, has increased by approximately 13% in 2010, and 43 countries were served. Although ACF International helped 5 million people compared to Mercy Corps impact on 19 million lives, the latter has a broader scope of operation (including disaster risk reduction, environmental and livelihood programs), and thus it is hard to compare the number of people in this case. Mercy Corps occupies the third place in the efficiency rating, and Handicap International holds the last position.

Efficiency of the nonprofits is also related to its selection of goals (their actuality) and to the choice of strategy for implementing these goals. However, in the case of nonprofits it is quite difficult to quantify these factors, because NGOs address world problems and the long-term impact of a particular organization is almost impossible to be measured.

Buyer/customer composition and characteristics

All humanitarian NGOs operate in the countries where social and economic problems exist due to different reasons: natural disasters, war conflicts and social instability, poor educational, agricultural or healthcare situation, overpopulation, etc. Most NGOs develop strategies aimed to reduce the effect of the negative phenomenon and to address this problem in the long-term perspective by providing technology, education, healthcare and other programs helping struggling countries to solve their problems and to become a developed society.

The regions where NGOs operate include Africa, Asian countries, Eastern Europe, South America etc. For ACF International, potential clients of their services reside in the countries with high world hunger index, high risk of natural disasters and high level of child malnutrition. For other NGOs, the range of the clients might differ, for example for Save the Children the clients are the children whose life is affected by negative conditions, and the parents of these children; for Mercy Corps, the clients are all people in crisis situations, and for Handicap International, potential clients of their services are disabled people living in poverty, exclusion, war conflict or affected by natural disasters. There is one common factor for these people – they definitely need help and do not have the resource to improve their lives without assistance.