InDaily’s South Australian Business Index, which ranks the top 100 local companies, explicitly excludes the non-profit sector.

However, non-profits are such a large and significant part of the local community – and economy – that we’ve worked with the Centre for Social Impact at Flinders University to analyse the data.

As with our first attempt at analysing the sector last year, we’ve made some decisions about which organisations we’ve included in the list.

Our focus is on community services – primarily aged care, community services, community housing and the disability services sector – using data from the Australian Charity and Nonprofit Commission register.

We have excluded the universities and private schools, along with the publicly-funded primary health care networks. For the purpose of this study we’ve also excluded organisations that are primarily focused on research, religious activities and education services which are irrelevant to social services. That’s not to say that these organisations aren’t providing excellent services and value to the community – many of them are – but our focus is on social services for this exercise. (Scroll to the bottom for more detail on our methodology).

The sector

At the end of 2021, there were at least 3278 charities and nonprofit organisations in South Australia registered with the ACNC.

In the ACNC data, about 7000 nonprofits did not either indicate which state they were located or provide their business address. It is therefore difficult to determine which state these nonprofits belong to. According to the proportion of SA nonprofits in Australia’s nonprofit sector, among these unidentified 7000 nonprofits around 500 nonprofits should be classified as SA nonprofits.

The following analysis is of the whole sector – not just the 50 top non-profits (scroll down to see the full table).

Economic impact

In 2021, the annual economic output of SA was $245.9 billion. The total gross income generated in the SA nonprofit sector was $9.3 billion. In other words, the nonprofit sector accounts for 3.8% of the economic output of SA.

“3.8% may sound not significant, but if compared with the contributions of other sectors to the economic output of SA, the economic impact of the nonprofit sector is substantial,” says Ian Goodwin-Smith, the Matthew Flinders Professor of Social Impact and Director of the Centre for Social Impact at Flinders University.

Across all economic output-generating sectors, the nonprofit sector is only slightly smaller than the retail trade sector ($9.3 billion), but larger than eight other sectors including “electricity, gas, water & waste services”, “education & training”, “wholesale trade”, “information media & telecommunications”, “accommodation & food services”, “other services”, and “arts & recreation services”.

Jobs and salaries

The nonprofit sector punches above its weight on employment, accounting for 7.37% of total jobs in SA.

The nonprofit sector in South Australia is the sixth largest employing sector. It is a significantly bigger employer than any primary industry sector. The number of jobs in the nonprofit sector was slightly smaller than that in the construction sector, but larger than those in 14 other sectors.

Salaries are also solid. In 2021, the total wages and salaries paid in the nonprofit sector accounted for 9.1% of the total wages & salaries in SA.

The average salary per employee is $93,121.4 in the sector. This places the nonprofit sector as the ninth most remunerative among all 20 sectors.

Social impact

In addition to 54,728 paid full-time staff, the SA nonprofit sector had 157,597 regular volunteers in 2021 who made significant contributions to SA.

The nonprofit sector also created significant other social impacts through its intervention in the negative social, economic and personal costs of a broad range of social issues, improving the lives of South Australians while boosting the economy and producing savings for the public purse.

None of these impacts were calculated in any of the measures above.

However, we intend to fill this gap by ranking the social impact of Australian nonprofit organisations from 2023.

The list

"We could have sliced this pie in many ways, but our focus on community services is a deliberate attempt to home in on a sector that’s geared towards producing social impact, but which is nonetheless an important part of our economic story," says Goodwin-Smith.

"We’ve developed a ranking of the state’s top 50 nonprofits by turnover.

"Coming in at number one and two are Southern Cross Care and Anglicare SA.

"These top two – along with the rest of the top 50 list – represent organisations providing aged care and community services which are critical to the effective functioning of our community.

"But these organisations aren’t just giants in terms of their social impact: all of the top five non-profits have turnovers in excess – sometimes well in excess – of $100 million per annum, which would put them comfortably in the top 100 businesses overall if turnover was the single criterion."

Step 2: only SA nonprofits selected

Step 3: all SA nonprofits are ranked by their total income, top 150 are selected

Step 4: following the methodology used in 2021, (1) universities, (2) private schools, and (3) publicly-funded local health networks are excluded from the list of 150, top 96 remains

Step 5: as the purpose of this study is to identify top SA nonprofits focusing primarily on social & community services, among the 96 nonprofits, those with main activity in (1) research, (2) religious activities, (3) higher education irrelevant to social services, and (4) other education irrelevant to social services are excluded.

Step 6: in the remaining list, two types of nonprofits with main activity in “Other health service delivery” and “Employment and training” are still ambiguous. The exclusion or inclusion determination is based on “Other health service delivery” or “Employment & training” being social & community service, e.g., providing other health services or employment & training services for people with disability, marginalized groups, etc., then such an organization is included in the list. If an organization is simply to provide “general” health service delivery or employment & training service but without a social & community service nature, then such an organization is excluded.

Analysis by Zhibin Zhang, Centre for Social Impact, Flinders University

CORRECTION: Due to an error in the data collection process, Uniting Communities was omitted from the original list. The organisation has been included in the updated chart above, coming in at number 10.