> For example, in order to maximize this ratio, the NPO "hires" an volunteer to design and build their website. Unfortunately, this person, while kind hearted a

> For example, in order to maximize this ratio, the NPO "hires" an volunteer to design and build their website. Unfortunately, this person, while kind hearted and generous, is not very talented / experienced... Long to short, the website "loses" over $500 per week in donations. Had the NPO paid for a better site their ROI and general goodwill would be much better. If a professional will prove to be a net-benefit to the non-profit (bringing in more donations than their salary) then in terms of benefit spend ratios, good charities have a hard floor of no less than 50%. In truth, if a creative professional is really worth their paycheck, then they're bringing in donations worth at least some multiple of their paycheck, which amortized across the charity, creates a soft floor somewhere around the 70-80% mark. Saying that benefit-to-admin ratios are bad measures is like saying that code coverage is a bad measure - it's only a bad measure if you're trying to max it out at 100%. Running a charity completely off volunteer work is clearly infeasible, even if the overhead that volunteers introduce seems to be zero from a surface-level, pure bean-counting, balance-sheet perspective. It's also, in effect, advocating for closing the books of NGOs. Mission-to-admin ratios, even if we take for argument's sake that they are poor ratios for management to focus on, are important to donors for obvious reasons. So arguing that NGOs can do better by not focusing on a metric that they are required by law to report and is squarely within donor interest is arguing to not need for the metric to be reported, so that the NGO can spend without judgement and hit some theoretical global max. Of course, allowing NGOs to close their books would be a disastrous incentive for fraud, embezzlement, and worse. So if the metric will exist, and will be focused on, good financing schemes will work with that metric in mind instead of wishing it didn't exist.