Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

80% is pretty good in the fundraising industry. Usually it's closer to 90%. Don't ever do one of those "text 12345 to donate to hurricane victims in the tropics" sort of thing, the returns on those are abysmal. But really, what do you expect? People doing work have to get paid. Most of the fuel in a rocket is for getting the rest of the fuel in the rocket off the ground.

One of the ways that fundraising departments try to keep the costs down is to use volunteer work (i.e., a form of donation of time) and internships to do the grunt work of calling people on the phone. Nobody expects those college kids to stay in those internships for their entire careers. Usually, they're only there for the "busy season", the end of the year where people rush to get donations in to count towards their tax writeoffs. For many of the kids, it's either that or a completely unpaid internship in advertising.

And government is actually a lot worse. In the US, only about 55% of your tax dollar goes towards social services. Then you have to take the admin percentage off the top of that. To beat an 80% number like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they'd have to keep overhead down to less than 64%. That's so absurdly low that I can't imagine it is possible.

My comment in my original post refers to the fact that every charity in the US is required to spend a certain percentage of their endowment every year. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a HUGE endowment. They have to spend so much that they can't find enough outlets for it. They have to fund projects that aren't necessarily part of their core goals because they can't fund their core goals anymore.

And the snarky comment about Al Qaeda is a commentary on the nature of Al Qaeda, they are not a single organization that operates above the board, they are themselves more of a foundation and loose conglomeration of various groups for mutual benefit. But the way our government casts it, if you help any organization that has any ties to Al Qaeda, then you are helping The Al Qaeda Man Who Is A Single Person Who 9/11 9/11 9/11.

So, when you have more money then you literally know what to do with, just tossing it around makes it very easy to hit Al Qaeda.

At most established nonprofits relatively little money actually goes to management. There have been a very few cases that have gotten a lot of publicity, but it's relatively a small (and dangerously over-stated) issue.

See Charity Navigator to see the 'management' costs, which are often quite small. http://www.charitynavigator.org/

That said, 'administrative expenses' are a notoriously poor way to measure nonprofits. The group GiveWell is known for attempting to rate charities based on impact. http://givewell.org/

Basically, A) The average charity doesn't spend that much on management. B) Even if the 'average' did, there are plenty that don't. C) Even so, try using 'impact' rather than 'administrative costs' D) There are many great causes to give to, and that's really all that matters here.

That said, I would typically expect large companies to have large biases to help local causes rather than the best things for the world.