"(RED)’s critical work provides access to life-saving HIV/AIDS programs in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to more than two thirds of the world’s HIV-positive population. One hundred percent of all money raised by (RED) goes directly to Global Fund HIV/AIDS grants that provide testing, counseling, treatment and prevention programs with a specific focus on eliminating transmission of the virus from moms to their babies. Since it was founded in 2006, (RED) has generated more than $465 million for the Global Fund, with more than $130 million from Apple alone."

http://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/03/apple-introduces-iphon...

Raise 1 million without advertising or executives => 1M for charity

Raise 2 million with 25% going to advertising+execs => 1.5M for charity

Raise 10 million with 80% going to advertising and executives => 2M for charity

Which one is better? From the point of view of the people who need it the latter, so where do we draw the line? Can we draw any line?

IMHO doing something that helps others does not mean you have to do it for free unless it's done under false pretenses. There is probably an equilibrium for maximizing the money raised for the cause where advertising and execs expenses are NOT 0.

Note: totally made up numbers, it's just an example

That doesn't work if the extra income is produced by convincing people to donate to your charity rather than others, which I'd bet is often the case. Comparing your first and third examples, that's $9 million that might have gone directly to people in need through a different charity.

I do agree that people who work for charities should be paid, but the overhead needs to be reasonable. I don't know where the line should be drawn, but if a charity has far worse overhead than average, that's probably a problem.

#2 imo. #3 is always at a perceptual disadvantage, because people are less willing to donate/spend on things they know have a high operating cost (in terms of salary/bonuses) when it comes to nonprofits.

Many would say it doesn't matter if the end amount gets where it's supposed to, but humans don't like the concept of wasting their charity.

Sorry it's intended to be a relationship and those were just a couple of examples. There are millions of values between #2 and #3, and some different relationship could be at play. What I mean is that for different people, wasting is a different value. Some people might be okay with a 40% overhead while other might not be okay with a 20% overhead.

I prefer, Case #1 esp. when it hires locals exclusively. Its much more robust and sustainable model.

Case #3 looks more like your average Poverty Inc. Circle Jerk. Where the 2 million will be largely spent on hiring consultants for high premium.

There's a finite number of dollars available for charity. There's a fine line between "raising awareness", and a zero-sum shouting match for attention.

Peacocks that invest energy into longer, heavier tails get more mates in the end, making it worth the investment for them and their offspring, but if all peacocks agreed to just halve the size of their tails, the species as a whole would suffer less predation and starvation (please ignore shoddy biology, take it as a crude analogy).

Not really. I was expecting you to be somewhat right since it's such a high profile thing and come on, Bono runs it, but their financials are pretty nice.

https://www.one.org/international/about/financials/

Seems like they have a very good rating for a charity. Maybe you don't like where the program money is being spent? A lot of the money is spent on policy change in UN and in other non-African nations?

The ONE Campaign spent 83% of its budget on raising public awareness and educating policy makers in support of smart and effective policies and programs that are saving the lives of millions of people living in the world’s poorest countries. We strive to spend as much of our budget as possible on this work, which has direct impact. The percentage of funds committed to these programs is above the international best practice of 80%.

source?

Source?

A source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070624105650/http://www.africo...

$100 million on marketing and billboards etc. $18 million actually raised. That was 2007.

That article got the numbers backward (or more likely, they used the $100M as shock value, not caring about providing facts). In other words, that $100M was never spent by (RED). On the contrary, it's an estimate of the advertising value that they would have needed, if they had bought themselves all the publicity that their campaign got. See how it's backwards?

Was bad journalism. You can simply look at their 990 form https://www.one.org/us/about/financials/

Non-profits must have open data showing how their money was spent.

> The collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola for the Red campaign has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million.

Even ignoring the weasely "some estimates", that's counting advertising by these companies. They advertise mostly to increase their own sales. That budget was never available to charity.

You can see this claim, their response, and a full breakdown of their donations on the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Red