Some small groups have extremely low overhead. As an example Monmouth County Friends of Clearwater has no paid employees and minimal admin costs. Though it depends on what you consider admin cost to.
The groups needs to pay insurance, pay for a phone, until recently printing a newsletter and other small costs. Including tithing a small amount of money to the parent organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.
Sometimes finding a small local all volunteer organization is the most likely to spend most of their donations on program. This is not a hit on larger groups though as to run a larger group it is nearly impossible to be all volunteer.
And any ones that don’t are probably cooking the books to say that.
For example, some say the Board covers all of the admin costs. But then they don’t count those Board donations with the other donations. Or they say all the admin work is done by unpaid volunteers, but don’t count that volunteer time as a donation.
Others just plain miscategorize expenses so they are not ‘admin’. Like sending out lots of solicitation letters, but including a paragraph or so reporting on their work this year. Then listing that mailing cost as ‘reporting activities to donors’ rather than as a fundraising expense. There are lots of accounting tricks to hide your admin expenses and make them look like program service expenses.
IMO, a functional charity should have admin expenses of 25-35% maximum. And minimum should be 7-10%; anything less than that and they are playing games with their accounting.
Both of those exceptions would not concern me as a prospective donor. It seems to me that if a prospective donor is deciding whether to donate to a charity they are likely concerned about how much of their contribution is going to administrative costs, i.e. if I give the charity $100 will the beneficiaries of that charity (not sure beneficiary is the right word; can’t think of how to phrase it at the moment) get a full $100 more than if I had not?
I don’t understand this part. If the group handles admin work without using any donated/grant money, how is that anything but a positive in terms of the question that **Guinastasia **asked?