Today I visited khanacademy.org and I got a big banner telling they need money and my donation would be matched. Khanacademy is a great website, they do great things, I have learned a lot on it and of course they need money to survive. Their income in 2023 was 59 million USD, of which 1,174,897 USD went to CEO Salman Khan.IRS 990 form
For me this is extremely demotivating to give money to because for 100k you could easily live a happy life, and for 1.1 million you could run an entire NGO(or two, even). I don't want to donate knowing that they're wasting a million, despite the great work they're doing.
I had a conversation with an activist friend the other day. We were walking around a fair with all kinds of activist groups, he said "don't give money to the group I'm with, they have enough, give it to that smaller group instead, they really need it." I found his comment really funny, as the group he pointed out which "had enough money" was by my standards really small and had no paid functions. That group thinks that Extinction Rebellion NL(XRNL) has a lot of money(about 830k EUR in assets in 2023, less than a handful temporarily paid peoples), but that is eclipsed by Greenpeace NL which I think has a lot of money(~24 million EUR revenue in 2023s)
Big NGOs have their function, a small action group could never sue a big company for example, or do really big projects that cost a lot of money. But I am also a fan of smaller groups, because sometimes they really need banal stuff. I once ran into an animal welfare activist group for example had on their donation page where they welcomed head mounted flashlights for example. That group made the news because they filmed something horrendous in an industrial pig farm. It feels like your money sometimes really makes it count, like your local squat who is really happy to receive a wool blanket in the winter. Plus, smaller groups can do whatever they like since they do not rely on governments or rich donors(i.e. bill gates), which they don't want to piss off so they might do self censorship or something like that.
Some NGOs in my opinion have just bad management. An example is Wikipedia, every year they *beg* for your money resulting in 185 million USD revenue(!), yet in my eyes all they need to do is keep the website running afloat, a few programmers for new features, maybe have a few admin people or paid special wikipedians, that's it. Yet every year their expenses and income grow and grow.(See also the essay "wikipedia has cancer").
Another example is Mozilla, behind Firefox, the last browser to not be Chrome(aside from Safari). Firefox is in deep shit and cut a lot of staff yet the CEO gets roughly 6.9 million USD.s Please use firefox though because it's actually really good and I don't want chrome to be the only browser to browse the web.
It should be noted however that an NGO can be large and still operate fairly efficiently.
If money is holding you back from participating in actions/demonstrations you can contact the people who are organizing it, usually they're willing to help. If you want to organize an action but money is holding you back, check in your area for action funds or action crowdfunding websites, they exist.
Consider supporting your local cool projects/action groups/whatever if you appreciate them and are able to!(or don't , i am not going to tell you what to do)