I’ve been ranting about how ridiculous it is to judge a charity by the % of its funds that go to administrative expenses, which I’ve dubbed the “Straw Ratio” because I was too lazy to find a prominent advocate of it so I just invented a Straw Man.
Well, it turns out there quite a lot of human men (and women) who make this mistake. Specifically, according to a recent study that I found out about from Gift Hub, 75% of high-net-worth households say they would give more to charity if less were spent on administrative expenses.
This aspect of charity got by far the strongest response out of anything the households were surveyed on. High-net-worth households care more about their money going to administration than they do about having more access to research (34%), or being able to determine the impact of their gifts (60%). See page 7 of the actual study if you think I’m lying.
Meanwhile, frustrated with the incompetence and disorganization I’ve seen in the nonprofit sector, I’ve practically been begging these guys to spend more on administrative expenses.
If these survey numbers are to be trusted, we’ve got quite a conundrum here. How do we convince people that this seductively easy-to-measure number is no more meaningful for a charity than for a company? How can we make people care more about accomplishing something than about pinching pennies from executives?
My initial ideas:
- Yell
- Blog
- Insist on calling the program expenses / total expenses the “Straw Ratio,” banking on the negative connotation of straw
- Start a project to collect all the meaningful information about charities that we can find in one place
- Hold a protest! We could march around with straw hats on – it would be so symbolic!
- Social networking