[throw4847285]

That's what an organization like Charity Navigator is for. Like a BBB for charities. I'm sure their methodology is flawed in some way and that there is an EA critique. But if I recall, early EA advocates used Charity Navigator as one of their inputs.

[directevolve]

Charity navigator quantifies overhead. EA tried to quantify impact. To understand the difference, consider two hypothetical charities. Charity A has $1 million/year in administrative costs, while charity B’s costs are only $500,00/year.

Based on this, charity navigator says charity A is lower-ranked than charity B.

Now imagine that charity A and B can each absorb up to $1 billion in additional funding to work on their respective missions. Charity A saves one life for every $1,000 it gets, while B saves one life for every $10,000 it gets.

Charity navigator wouldn’t even attempt to consider this difference in its evals. EA does.

These evals get complex, and the EA organizations focused on charity evals like this have sophisticated methods for trying to do this well.

[lmm]

The "Program Expense Ratio" is pretty prominent in Charity Navigator's reports, and that's almost exactly a measure of "overhead".