Good Referrals

ACRE exclusively serves the nonprofit community, providing services that reduce their purchase prices, labor costs, and operating expenses. Here’s how:

· Aggregate nonprofit demand over time to negotiate favorable pricing for participating nonprofits with nonprofit service providers.
· Offer exclusive rebates on select nonprofit services.
· Curate the most comprehensive and updated repository of discount offers and special deals for nonprofits.
· Offer low-cost outsourced support services performed by human experts supported by AI administrative assistance. Services include bookkeeping, operations management, virtual assistants, governance-related content creation, and public policy research and advocacy.
· Benchmarking spending data against similar nonprofits to identify cost saving opportunities.
· Curating model nonprofit spending practices from the nonprofit community.

Nonprofits pay nothing for any of these services, except for the low-cost outsourced support services. ACRE also provides free guidance and ideas to any nonprofit looking for ways to save money on a particular program or expenditure, or looking for new ways to reduce overall spending without negatively impacting their mission. ACRE makes its money through negotiated agreements with providers. Such arrangements are made completely transparent to nonprofits and all qualifying bids or offers are presented to nonprofit clients, whether the company has an agreement with ACRE or not.

Nonprofits often don’t have time to engage in strategic cost management. And many likely underestimate the potential impact it could have on their budget. But the benefits can be substantial! Strategic cost management is not about cutting programs. It’s not about austerity. It’s not about squeezing already stretched teams.

It’s about strengthening how resources are structured so that more of every dollar supports mission delivery — without undermining necessary investment in people, infrastructure, or growth. It’s about design. How intentionally are contracts negotiated? How strategically are vendors selected? How much leverage is being left on the table because organizations operate in isolation?

The nonprofit sector has something most industries don’t. They are rarely direct competitors. One organization’s success does not require another’s failure. That creates opportunity. Opportunity to share insight. Opportunity to collaborate. Opportunity to strengthen collective buying power. Opportunity to rethink how operational and administrative costs are structured. And those opportunities can pay off in surprising ways. The goal isn’t to reduce spending indiscriminately. The goal is to amplify nonprofit impact through smarter cost strategy.

ACRE was founded in 2023 by Craig Price, a former nonprofit association executive and consultant to nonprofit management. Our services are open to any US-based nonprofit organization of any size, but many of the providers we work with may restrict cost-saving and discount officers to charitable organizations or subsets of those organizations.