Here's a great article on co-locating nonprofits to capture economies of scale.
Expand Your Nonprofit’s Mission Through Co-Location, Jean Butzen, 11 Jan 2012, Stanford Social Innovation Review.
There is a more general movement to reduce back office costs for nonprofits. SeaChange Capital Partners helps nonprofits, among other services, merge to reduce costs. Their idea - and their leadership - comes from Goldman Sachs. They saw an especially strong need for M&A in the nonprofit sector because too often multiple nearly-identical service providers compete for and split the same donor pools and then eat away at that money with their own backend systems and other SG&A expenses. (Of course donors may have an interest in funding several manifestations of the same service, for example to discover which version works best.) And not all nonprofit operations could reduce operational costs - or live through post-merger integration that is difficult even in environments where employees are not as mission-driven.
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