Doing good isn’t the same as doing well

This is something I’ve learned after years knocking around social policy and community services: an organisation can be doing wonderful work and still be one bad quarter from going under. Doing good and doing well aren’t the same thing — and pretending otherwise has cost this sector more than it should have. SAS Impact was created to fill that gap.

SAS Impact is SAS Group’s impact advisory arm, built for organisations in the care economy — e.g. disability services, mental health, homelessness, aged care, residential care. The people and services that care for our most vulnerable. It’s a big patch of the economy too — $208 billion nationally in 2022–23, about 8 per cent of GDP and tipped to hit 15 per cent by 2062. And it’s under more pressure than most people realise. Demand’s climbing fast. State and federal funding isn’t keeping up — if anything, it’s going backwards in real terms. Some of that is simple arithmetic: when national productivity softens, government revenue softens with it, and there’s less in the pool to go around — not a failure of will, but a shortage of means. More people needing help, less money coming through the door to help them.

Here’s the bit that keeps me up at night. Most organisations in this space are block-funded charities. Good people, dead-set committed to the cause. But they were never built to run like a business — they were built to deliver a service against a grant, report back, and do it all again next year. Nothing wrong with that, until the ground shifts underneath them.

And it’s shifting. Government is moving from paying for outputs to paying for outcomes, and other funders are already there. It’s no longer enough to say, “we ran 200 sessions” — they want to know what actually changed. Compliance keeps growing. Community expectations keep growing. And there’s private and philanthropic capital out there too. Australia’s impact investing market has passed $157 billion, growing nearly eight-fold since 2020 — but only for those that can actually show they’re worth the punt. And it’s not just for organisations under pressure. Any organisation — however well-funded, however comfortable its current arrangement with government — can use that capital to broaden what it does and go deeper into the difference it’s making.

Three fronts opening up at once, on organisations that have never had to fight on any of them. Most never had the commercial thinking, financial know-how or organisational grunt to make that pivot. Why would they? Nobody ever asked it of them before.

That’s the gap we exist to fill. Not a lecture about “running lean” or “acting like a business” — just practical help. Getting the business itself sorted to ensure resilient service provision: governance, structure, a plan that actually attracts capital. Getting a straight line between what you do and the difference it makes — proper measurement. Telling that story plainly, so government, funders and your own community can actually see it.

Because impact isn’t a buzzword. It’s the vehicle — the thing that actually carries an organisation from block-funded charity to impact enterprise, without losing its heart or mission. A block-funded charity delivers a service against a grant and reports back. An impact enterprise does the same good work, but knows what it’s achieving, can prove it, and can build a financial base that doesn’t depend on any one grant round surviving contact with a budget cycle. Getting from one to the other isn’t about becoming less of a charity. It’s about becoming a charity that can’t be knocked over.

And I don’t think that’s optional for leaders who are genuinely driven by values. If you’re leading, governing or building a charity because you believe in the people it serves, then sustainability isn’t a side project or a nice-to-have alongside the mission — it’s part of the obligation. An unsustainable organisation doesn’t just risk itself. It risks the people who have nowhere else to go if it closes. Good intentions don’t cushion that fall. Run a sustainable outfit, show what it’s actually achieving, and keep doing right by the people you serve.

The care and wellbeing of vulnerable people, families and communities depend, in the end, on the health of the organisations looking after them — which is a very unromantic thing to say about a very human calling, but it’s true. Here in Queensland, that’s a $35 billion not-for-profit sector, carried by charities big and small. Shaky organisations mean shaky services. Broke organisations don’t make it to next year, and the people relying on them don’t get to wait for the next one to be built. Government has funded outputs for decades — that’s coming to an end, and what comes next belongs to the organisations ready for outcomes, and ready to go looking for other sources of capital, not just grants.

For our commercial partners, this matters too. A stronger care economy makes for a stronger community, and it’s increasingly where the real impact investment opportunities are sitting — a $157 billion pool and growing, looking for exactly the kind of well-run organisations our work exists to create.

That’s the work. Using impact as the vehicle to move good organisations from block-funded charity to impact enterprise — so they’re still standing, still doing great work, for years to come. If any of this sounds like your patch, give me a shout.