In the UK, charities have lately come under fire after the scandalous demise of Kid's Company, but criticisms that call for business practices to measure nonprofits are not new.
"The Parliamentary report on the collapse of Kid’s Company emphasised the lack of oversight by the charity’s trustees, which was certainly a major factor in its demise, but the report severely underplayed the fact that the charity had been the darling of politicians of all shades and had been awarded grants often against the advice of experts or civil servants. Supporting charitable causes based on political expediency has always been a feature of government and despite new rules being drawn up to ensure that all requests are properly assessed against rigorous criteria one suspects that personal ministerial bias will always trump objective due diligence.
"Then we have the issues of fundraising and especially income versus expenditure ratios. The Charity Organisation Society in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often pontificated about the excessive sums that were spent on fundraising. Their campaign reached a crescendo during the First World War with the COS, the press and many others demanding legislation on the issue. Though they got their way over the registration of charities, the government wisely resisted calls to impose fixed ratios on fundraising or administrative costs."--Peter Grant, History of Philanthropy