When Karen Beavor and her colleagues started examining purchasing practices across the more than 3,000 non-profit organisations in the state of Georgia, they found they were spending about 8 per cent of their budgets on office supplies and equipment

“That’s a lot,” says Ms Beavor, who is president and chief executive of the Georgia Center for Nonprofits, which aims to improve charities’ use of their resources. “In a for-profit, it’s more like 3 or 4 per cent, and 5 per cent is high. So the question was, ‘what’s going on there?’ ”