While nonprofit experts are pushing charities to merge as a way to keep up with increasing demands for services and tighter budgets, the experiences of several organizations offer cautionary tales of what can happen when charities merge, reports the MinnPost.com.

Jan McDaniel, chief executive officer for the American Red Cross Twin Cities Chapter, characterized her organization’s 2006 merger, which joined the organization’s Minneapolis and St. Paul chapters, as “messy.”

“It was pretty awful,” said Ms. McDaniel. “Frankly, the first year was just running around trying to clean up mistakes.”

Jodi Sandfort, associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute and a nonprofit-management expert, thinks information about nonprofit mergers is insufficient and poorly understood.

“It was shocking to me to realize — particularly because of how important it is on the private-sector side — how little is understood on the nonprofit side,” she said.

According to one study, the Stanford Project on the Evolution of Nonprofits, nonprofit groups should save more money, budget more time, and get to know each other’s organization’s better before considering a merger.