One of the facts surfaced in the recent exploration about the veterans charity groups (see Washington Post or New York Times) is that some 70-80% of the amount of money raised goes to the cost of raising the money.

Over the years I have wrestled with the right and wrongness of this statistic -- a statistic actually  frowned upon but not uncommon for many nonprofits in communities throughout the US.  The most common "violators" of the "this is too much money being spent for raising money" tends to be the civic groups like police athletic leagues or fireman groups.  Their argument for spending so much: "if they didn't buy a fundraising firm they wouldn't have the capacity to raise any money -- better twenty cents than nothing."

It certainly does seem to be the fact that groups who are relatively  new to the community or have a lot of turnover in their membership don't have a lot of other ways to raise money and certainly do, as these veterans groups demonstrate, raise a lot of money when they set out to do so.

So, haven't these groups succeeded in parting a dollar from an otherwise unwilling to give public?  And haven't folks (vets or youth or animals) benefited more than they would have if these groups hadn't done this much for them?  Did the donor public really get duped or did they not ask the right question and have a more informed choice?

I believe in the nonprofit standards (no more than 20%) established by the Charity Navigators and Guidestars of the world but I can't help appreciate that a dime of a dollar raised is still ten more cents going to an individual in need that would have gone to begin with.