When is Administrative Efficiency Associated With Charitable Donations?

Whether accounting measures of administrative efficiency affect donations is an important issue for nonprofit managers. Prior research is inconclusive. Some studies find a significant negative relation, whereas others find no significant relation. The authors investigate a variety of reasons for the prior divergent results. The evidence is consistent with donors reducing contributions to organizations reporting higher administrative expense ratios when the ratios are presumably most relevant and reliable. The authors suggest that certain prior studies failed to find significant associations largely because their samples contained many organizations for which the administrative ratios were unreliable or not helpful for donor needs. Model specification issues also affect prior studies but are less critical than sample composition. When the authors replicate prior studies on samples containing established, donation-dependent organizations with nontrivial amounts of fund-raising and administrative expenses, they generally detect a significant negative association.