As soon as you start looking at outcomes you need to include charities that fund bad things. Many charities missions makes the world worse. Let's promote abstinence only education! Let's take the kids to the Intelligent Design Museum! Or for the religious, let's promote Atheism!
Re:The Undermining of American Charity
by JoshTriplett on Wednesday August 31, 2016 @12:05PM
(#12399308)
I absolutely agree. I wouldn't suggest a naive definition of "overhead" as "everything spent on administration"; a reasonable organization need some amount of administration, and "0 overhead" would be the sign of an unhealthy organization (or a passthrough shell).
The ones that are incredibly efficient are the ones that deliver on their mission well for the amount of dollars that go into them; this may or may not correspond to a low share of money spent on administration.
In charities -- and the same is true for public agencies -- people love to complain about high administrative overhead, but then also love to turn around and complain when ineffective administrative oversight results in non-administrative uses of funds being wasteful or ineffective, asking why controls weren't in place to prevent that.