Why Telecommunications Deserves the Same Scrutiny as Your Super Fund
Ask any not-for-profit board how closely they examine spending, and the answer is usually: very. Program delivery, staffing, compliance, overheads - all of it gets weighed against the mission and expected to earn its place in the budget. Yet one line item routinely escapes that level of attention: telecommunications.
Most organisations pick a phone or internet provider the same way they'd pick a light fitting - cheapest option that does the job reliably, then it's forgotten. It's filed away as an operational detail rather than something worth interrogating. That's an assumption worth revisiting.
Every telecommunications provider makes money from the contracts it holds - and that profit goes somewhere. For most providers, it ends up with shareholders, private equity firms, or an overseas parent company. None of which have any stake in the not-for-profit sector at all.
For organisations whose entire purpose is social impact, that's an odd oversight. Money is leaving the organisation every single month, and none of it circles back to the sector generating it.
A gap in what "value for money" really means
None of this is a new issue in procurement circles. It's really a question of what "getting good value" actually means. NFP boards already think this way about superannuation, banking, and insurance - they ask whether the institutions managing their money align with their values, not just whether the rates are competitive.
Telecommunications rarely gets asked the same question, even though once you tally mobiles, data plans, and connectivity across an entire staff, it's often a far larger expense than anyone has bothered to calculate.
Goodtel was built to close that gap
We're an Australian-owned, certified B Corp telco created specifically for the not-for-profit sector, running on the mobile networks NFPs already trust. Half of our profits go to charity partners working across environmental protection, humanitarian causes, and animal welfare. We work exclusively with NFPs - more than 200 of them so far - because we'd rather prove a telco can serve its sector than just sell to it.
For a CEO or board considering the switch, the logic holds up. Network coverage doesn't change - you're still on a major Australian carrier, so there's no reliability trade-off. What does change is who understands your organisation: a telco working solely within the NFP space knows the operating pressures you face in a way a generalist provider simply won't. Combine that with a provider returning half its profit to the sector rather than to a shareholder register, and it becomes difficult to justify not looking further.
Switching is easier than the delay suggests
We often hear the same hesitation from NFP leaders: reviewing a telco contract sits low on the priority list, easily pushed aside by funding pressures and workforce demands that feel more urgent. In reality, telco contracts are among the simpler ones to move. Phone numbers transfer without disruption, the switch happens in the background, and most organisations that move to Goodtel cut their telco spend by up to 40% through NFP-specific pricing - with some saving as much as 70%.
The real cost was never the time it takes to review a contract. It's the years spent quietly funding a bill that could instead be funding programs - with no change required to how the organisation actually operates day to day.
If telecommunications has never been treated as a mission-aligned decision rather than a pure cost play, it's worth raising before the next contract renewal comes up. Not because switching providers is a big deal - it isn't - but because profit leaving the sector by default, unquestioned, deserves to be a deliberate choice instead.
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Posted: September 2026