Pierre M. Omidyar and Peter B. Lewis are in many ways opposites. But as philanthropists, both are handing out human resources advice along with the money they give to nonprofit groups, a strategy that underscores concerns by donors and even some organisations’ leaders about the management of such groups.

“Pretty early on, I realised that when I asked these organisations about management, the response I usually got was, `That’s business and we’re not a business,”’ Lewis said. “I told them baseball teams have managers, too, but that seemed to have little impact on their opinion.”

Human resources is, in fact, the non-profit version of “eat your peas,” according to a study done last fall of some 3,000 leaders of smaller charities by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and the Meyer Foundation. Those non-profit executives, ranked human resources the most challenging and least satisfying part of their jobs.

Only a few said personnel management was “energising,” while more than half said it was “somewhat depleting” or “depleting.” Marla Cornelius, senior project director at CompassPoint, said: “There’s no such thing as a period of time when you’re not challenged by staff issues as the leader of a non-profit. And since many non-profits don’t have a dedicated human resources staff person, managing personnel just sucks you in and takes over your life.”

The Omidyar Network, through which Omidyar supports both commercial and non-profit ventures, found that charities set goals that often did not match their employees’ skill sets, lacked succession-planning and were led by executives stretched too thin.

In 2006, Lewis set up a non-profit group called the Management Center to provide human resources and other consulting services to groups to which he and others donated. He has tangled with prominent organisations like Case Western Reserve University over what he considers bad management, but he said he had intended the Management Center to work primarily with the fledgling progressive groups he was underwriting then.

“They weren’t so interested, so I finally had to say, `I won’t give you any more money until you learn this stuff,”’ Lewis said.

Non-profit leaders are notoriously prickly about allowing major donors to get involved in how they manage their organisations, but officials of groups that have used the services provided by Lewis and Omidyar say they were enormously beneficial.

Omidyar’s background as a young entrepreneur struggling to manage eBay’s explosive growth provided him with experience he wanted to pass on as he became a philanthropist.

So after establishing the Omidyar Network, he hired Sal Giambanco, an executive who oversaw human resources at eBay and PayPal. Giambanco and his team have worked with 47 non-profits, more than half the network’s charitable portfolio.

David S. Bennahum, the CEO of the non-profit investigative news operation, the American Independent News Network, credits the center with finding a way to manage a workforce that had rapidly expanded.

“For the first time, we created quarterly goals for the whole organisation,” he said. “We had 58 impact stories last year, stories that had real consequences in communities around the country, and it wasn’t just by accident — we worked towards that goal.”