I Will Ask You Questions - Now with MORE fantasy ecology!

If you were put in charge of a nonprofit / charity organization and were given a budget of only a few million dollars, how would your organization spend this money to accomplish the most good? Would you try to acquire other donors, or simply spend the endowment that you have received?

It's been a while and I got distracted but hey, let's answer this.

The cop-out answer is it depends. Some causes are naturally cheaper than others, and can get away with a smaller percentage of money spent on charitable action-- something like Doctors Without Borders would likely have a higher cost than say, trying to spread awareness of a particular societal ill (and spreading awareness would actually feed into acquiring other donors, I'd imagine). To commit a huge logical fallacy and use anecdotal evidence, my research this semester is in the field of cancer biology and might cost three thousand dollars, at most. I'm working in flies rather than people, so there's that, but it's possible to stretch money really far.

Even then, though, I'd probably put most of my money towards support and not towards the administrative overhead of acquiring more donors. To some extent I'd say it's easier for a charitable organization to get away with a smaller overhead because of the internet (anecdotal evidence, again: that ALS charity and the ice bucket challenge. I have no breakdown of the cost of internet viral things, because predicting whether or not something'll go viral is impossible, but it's probably reasonably cheap unless you pay to get celebrities involved). Assuming my few million is say, three million, just a tenth of that on overhead's still 300,000 dollars, which is a mildly unimaginable sum of money. I could probably cover most shit I'd need to spend money on with that, and put the rest into direct spending towards whatever my cause is.