May 21st, 2013 – A columnist for The Seattle Times recently suggested that drawing conclusions about a nonprofit organization based on a single overhead percentage is about as useful and fair as interpreting one’s own health based on a composite cholesterol score.

While society has wised up to understanding that it’s the numbers behind the composite cholesterol reading that are the real indicators of overall health, the same can’t be said about wising up to the fact that a nonprofit’s true efficiency can’t be sized up by one number.