I think this is on the decline today. The caricatured history of the idea is basically: (1) Smart people looked at NGOs, say international aid NGOs. They note

I think this is on the decline today. The caricatured history of the idea is basically: (1) Smart people looked at NGOs, say international aid NGOs. They note that some spend a lot of money raising money. There are ugly examples like for profit chuggers with a >50% commission. Other examples where "donor country" administration budgets are far larger than "recipient country" budgets. (2) They create a KPI, that basically defines two categories of expense "admin" and "work." Looking over existing NGOs, a low "admin %" structure correlates strongly with effectiveness (3) Foundations adopt this, optimizing to the KPI (4) The KPI does not survive transition from measure to goal. This is a recurring problem. If that is what attracts donations, NGOs can improve their admin/total cost ratio. Improving this ratio directly does not cause an improvement to overall effectiveness, even though a correlation existed pre-intervention. This happens a lot in business, what was a good measure does not make a good optimisation goal. Selling financial products may be a good measure of a bank teller. It means he engages with customers, and knowing which products products they might want. Once you make it a goal and pay tellers a bounty, they achieve this goal by pressuring or tricking customers. Wells Fargo recently did this, and ended up incentivising tellers (and managers) to commit outright fraud. Meanwhile, such broad measures bucket things in ways that do not make sense. Chuggers are incentive-pay fundraisers who sign up donors to make monthly contributions. They get big bounties, often more than the charity gets. When a donor realises that half his donation went to the door-to-door salesman, they feel totally ripped off. In terms of the administrative/total budget KPI, a fun run is just like a chugger. Fun runs are costly to run, and less than half of what you pay actually goes to charitable causes. But, the "donor" is probably fine with this. They paid to participate in a run, raising money and awareness in the process. Basically, this article describes another idea for solving a hard problem... one that isn't solved.