Valerie S. Lies: It's Time for Real Talk About Real Nonprofit Overhead Costs

Valerie S. Lies: It's Time for Real Talk About Real Nonprofit Overhead Costs: This is a welcome development for donors and nonprofits alike. For too long the laser-like focus on nonprofits doing more with less when it comes to overhead and administrative expenses has unnecessarily limited their abilities to fulfill or expand their missions.

To be sure, ratios can be a measure of an organization's effectiveness and should be used as one of a set of tools to identify mismanagement or malfeasance. But we ask charities to do too much with too little to achieve effective ratios. It's time we start looking at an organization's outcomes -- in addition to what they spend to achieve them -- when determining where our charitable dollars go.