Show Me the Money
A Full Breakdown of NGO Intel Podcast Series 4
Funding is the lifeblood of every NGO. It is also, for many organisations working in conservation, counter-trafficking, and humanitarian response, the most politically complex, operationally constraining, and least honestly discussed aspect of the work. In Episode 4 of the NGO Intel Podcast Series, Founder James Ellender sits down with Senior Advisor Christian Plowman to address that gap directly.
Christian Plowman brings a rare combination of perspectives to the conversation. A former Metropolitan Police detective with sixteen years of experience in human source development and undercover operations, he later served as an INTERPOL intelligence officer before moving into the international NGO sector. He is a member of the UK Government DEFRA Illegal Wildlife Trade Advisory Group, a contributor to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, and an honorary lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. He has trained more than 1,200 law enforcement officers across Africa, Asia, and Europe in conservation-oriented investigative strategy and intelligence management.
Across five substantive questions, the conversation covers the capacity gap that major funding can expose, the metrics trap driving short-termism, the agility problem created by restricted funding models, the scarcity mindset limiting collaboration, and the lessons that law enforcement and the NGO world could genuinely take from each other.
When the Money Arrives
The first question addresses something the sector rarely discusses with full candour: whether a sudden influx of major funding actually solves an NGO’s core problems. Christian’s answer is both direct and nuanced. It can do both, but rarely in the proportions anyone hopes for.
“The money only works really when you have the capacity to absorb it. It’s a bit like receiving a flood of water into a drainage system that’s just designed for a trickle.”
– Christian Plowman
The capacity problem, he explains, is compounded by the expectation gap between funders and the organisations they support. Donors arrive with a vision of success that rarely maps onto operational reality, particularly in intelligence work, where the most productive periods can look, from the outside, like nothing is happening. Explaining that to a funder expecting arrests is one of the more diplomatically demanding conversations in the sector
The Metrics Trap
The second question draws out one of the most important analytical frameworks in the discussion: the problem of headline metrics. For fifteen years, conservation donors have been conditioned to measure success through arrests, seizures, and prosecutions. That conditioning has shaped the wrong incentives.
“If that’s all you’re measuring, then you’ve incentivised the wrong things for NGOs. You end up with organisations chasing really quick enforcement wins at the expense of the slow essential work of building intelligence networks.”
– Christian Plowman
Christian makes the case for disruption as an alternative metric framework, arguing that a criminal network that has changed its operating methods because it knows it is being watched is a disrupted network, even without an arrest. He also sets out why HUMINT investment should be framed as infrastructure rather than operational expenditure, and explains how transparency around ethical and legal frameworks governing covert activity has, in his experience, built rather than undermined donor confidence.
Restricted Funding, Unrestricted Threats
The third question addresses the agility problem directly. Wildlife trafficking networks operate continuously. They adapt in real time. They do not wait for NGO funding cycles. But NGO response capacity is almost entirely governed by what a donor agreed to fund months or years earlier, based on a threat landscape that no longer exists in the same form.
Christian gives a concrete example of intelligence emerging on a new trafficking corridor, where a genuine window for intervention, measured in days, was lost because the available funding was locked to a pre-agreed work plan with no connection to that specific corridor.
“In reality, you know what happens. You file it away and carry on with your projects. And you hope that potentially there’ll be some actionable intel still there when your funding cycle allows it to be pursued. It’s a real missed opportunity, and it happens significantly more often than people think.”
– Christian Plowman
The solution he advocates is a small responsive budget line within major projects, an allocation of unrestricted operational reserves that allows teams to pursue live intelligence opportunities without triggering a formal amendment process. Some progressive funders are beginning to adopt this model. It remains rare.
The Scarcity Mindset
The fourth question explores why NGOs are often reluctant to collaborate on joint funding proposals, even when doing so would unlock significantly larger funding than any organisation could access alone. The scarcity mindset, Christian explains, is both rational and self-defeating.
“Each NGO is in competition with another. It’s a really crowded funding landscape. But that mindset actually feeds the conditions that create it. We end up with a fragmented system of small individual projects competing for a limited pool, rather than a collaborative consortium winning exponentially larger multilateral funding.”
– Christian Plowman
His strategy for overcoming it is to demonstrate transparency and openness first: sharing data, methodology, and credit before asking for reciprocity, and identifying non-competitive areas of collaboration where the shared benefit is obvious and no single organisation has a claim over the output.
Two Worlds, One Problem
The fifth and final question asks Christian to compare how funding dictates operational priorities across law enforcement and the NGO sector. His answer recognises genuine advantages on both sides.
Law enforcement funding, broadly annual and institutionally guaranteed, enables the kind of multi-year strategic planning and patient asset development that conservation intelligence work demands but rarely receives. The NGO world, constrained by exactly the lack of that security, has compensated by developing agility, creativity, and collaborative instincts that government structures, risk-averse and compartmentalised, often cannot match.
“Some of the most effective disruption of wildlife trafficking networks I’ve seen has come from very small conservation teams with a tiny budget, but they have the freedom to act quickly, choose who to partner with, and share intelligence outside of that bureaucratic methodology.”
– Christian Plowman
The ideal model, as he puts it, sits somewhere in the middle: the strategic patience and institutional legitimacy of government, combined with the adaptability and collaborative instinct of the best NGO practitioners. Building that combination in practice is the challenge the sector needs to take seriously.
Looking Ahead
James closes the episode by previewing Podcast Series 5, which will focus on cost savings, the use of AI and machine learning in NGO intelligence work, and the challenge of deploying technology in ways that preserve the quality and integrity of the intelligence product.
Episode 4 is available now on the NGO Intel YouTube channel. All five questions explored in this episode will be expanded into individual thought-leadership articles over the coming weeks, covering each theme in depth for practitioners, funders, and policy professionals working across the conservation and counter-trafficking sector.
NGO Intel is backed by Futurum Risk and delivers open-source intelligence, screening, and monitoring services to NGOs operating in South East Asia and Africa. Learn more at ngointelligence.com