Technically, non-profit only means that the corporation is not allowed to directly redistribute profit to it's shareholders. This reduces the amount of pressure from shareholders to generate large profits, but still even non-profit corporation has to pay it's expeditures somehow and not lose money doing so.
> This reduces the amount of pressure from shareholders to generate large profits
Just to clarify, since this sentence was ambiguous: not-for-profit companies do not have shareholders or owners. So the fact that there is no "pressure from shareholders" is vacuously true, because there are no shareholders.
Not-for-profits typically have donors and boards of directors, who both apply pressure to see the corporation's funds used to realize its mission.
When I wrote that sentence I thought about changing "shareholders" to "members" or "stakeholders", but then I left it as it was because it seemed to more clearly represent the contrast or absence there of to for-profit corporation.
I'm board member of smallish Czech non-profit and one of the things I've found out is that the legal requirements on the corporate governance structure are mostly equivalent to what is required for publicly tradeable corporation that is actually not publicly traded, thus for me it makes some sense to equate voting members to shareholders.
