Liana Downey, a New York strategic consultant and author who was once the Braddon Pizza Hut's first "delivery girl", said not-for-profits needed a clear focus and to do their homework to avoid failed models.

"There is a lot of research which says the more goals you take on the less likely you are to achieve them," she said.

A former special strategic adviser to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Ms Downey has returned to Australia to promote her new book Mission Control, in which she said measuring impacts, not just inputs, was crucial to avoiding well-intentioned agendas becoming ineffective or harmful.

She pointed to a successful US government strategy to encourage people to shift to low-fat milk, based on a supposed correlation between whole-fat dairy consumption and heart disease. The change in behaviour was massive, but there was no lowering in heart disease rates, she said.

"The research suggested that we see more intensive heart disease where they have lower milk fats," she said.

JBWere's recent Cause Report showed there were nearly 57,000 not-for-profits in Australia, twice as many as 20 years ago. Australian charities also faced significant donor funding challenges, with individual giving as a percentage of GDP at 0.23 per cent, compared to 1.44 per cent in the US, the report found.

Ms Downey said pressures to deviate from a core focus, such as to attract research funding, were understandable but could slow achievement. But Australia had a proven track-record for delivering successful public awareness campaigns.

"Australia has really been seen as absolutely world leading – [on] skin cancer, cigarette abatement policies – and that's come from Canberra," she said.

Ms Downey led international consulting firm McKinsey & Company's Australian government and social-sector practices before moving to the United States in 2011. Her work has included helping the New York City education department shift their measure of success from graduation rates to university and job readiness.