We met with a representative from MCC today.  We love MCC.  We also donate a lot to them.

One of the standard measures of a charity's efficiency is, "how much of the charity's revenues go to program costs versus administration costs?"  Charities strive to be under 20% in administration costs, because those that spend lots on administration also often have serious ethical concerns (like overpaid senior staff, say).

MCC is pretty decent in size, but its programs are extremely efficient.  In particular, it has lots of semi-volunteer staff (who are often following whatever the Mennonite equivalent of the Quaker concept of a leading is) from the developed world who work for peanuts in developing countries (basically, they're paid their living expenses plus a tiny stipend), a small amount of professional staff in developing countries paid essentially Canada's minimum wage, and then lots of local partners paid whatever a fair wage is by local standards.  So that means that they're tremendously efficient, which is great!  They have all of these very cheap programs all around the world.

Except that the central (i.e., Canadian) cost of administering cheap programs is no lower than the cost of administering expensive programs.  And same with fundraising: it turns out that a funny consequence of spending so little on programs is that they can't, actually, spend all that much on fundraising either, because the money for hiring fundraisers is eaten up by administering all of their programs.

After spending a few years learning about how Waterloo does fundraising (it was very funny having her quickly learn that, no, I really do know this language), it was eye-opening to see how different things are for "real" charities.