It's measured as overhead and/or donation acquisition expenses. It's never 100%. You can assume some percent of that money goes to such expenses vs actual research (which I guess is where you'd want the money to go, or maybe to outreach or supporting individuals with cf).
That’s not quite what I’m getting at. A marketing dollar that brings in two dollars that would have otherwise been spent on coke is good, a marketing dollar that brings in two dollars that would have otherwise been spent on a different decent charity is not good.
An additional complication: according to the Centre for Effective Altruism, charities vary hugely - several orders of magnitude - in their ability to turn dollars into benefit.
I think the question above is whether nonprofits are playing a zero-sum game - if donors have set aside some budget, and you "acquire" a donation by competing another equally worthy non-profit (instead of competing against the donor's savings account), it's not clear that this is good for the high-level goals of society.
In the long run, it will turn into the same arms race as political donations. At the end of the day, every candidate is trying to win over the same voters, so the net effect of Party X spending $100 million on ads and Party Y spending $50 million isn't terribly different from Party X spending $10 million on ads and Party Y spending $5 million - it certainly does not yield an election that is ten times better at reflecting the voters' preferences. And it may well yield an election that's about how well the parties can market themselves and not how well they can govern.
If cystic fibrosis is a problem that needs ten times the spending of muscular dystrophy, but the muscular dystrophy folks are ten times better at fundraising, the effect of that is to divert funds from cystic fibrosis into getting them to be one hundred times better at fundraising than they used to be.
(I don't have an answer here, any more than I have an answer to how to curtail campaign spending.)
