Charity efficiency is often presented through a small set of ratios showing how much an organization spends on programs and how much it costs to raise donations. Many people know Kars4Kids from its familiar jingle, but fewer know the fundraising model behind it. Kars4Kids is a national nonprofit that funds youth development, education, and mentorship programs for children. It is built around physical assets that have to be collected and sold before they generate cash, and it makes Kars4Kids an unusually useful example of where those ratios can mislead.
Program percentage measures how much of an organization’s total spending is classified as charitable program expense, and is one of the standard measurements used to evaluate charities. A 75 percent program percentage means that 75 cents of every dollar spent went into the program category, while the remainder is typically classified as fundraising or administration. Fundraising efficiency measures a different part of the finances. A cost of $20 to raise $100 means the organization incurred $20 of fundraising expense for each $100 in related contributions.
A car donated to Kars4Kids undergoes several steps before its value can support a charitable program. Once a donor agrees to give up the vehicle, the charity handles the title transfer, arranges towing, finds a buyer, and completes the sale. Each step carries a cost, giving vehicle fundraising a different expense structure from a credit card donation or a check.
Vehicle donation complicates that comparison because charities can organize the same basic fundraising activity in very different ways.
One model relies on an outside processor. Some national charities route their vehicle donations to a third-party company such as Advanced Remarketing Services, which arranges towing, title transfers, and vehicle sales. Under that arrangement the charity generally receives anywhere from 25 to 80 percent of the vehicle’s gross selling price, depending on the processor used, with a significant part of the donation covering the processor’s fee, administration and logistics costs.
Those costs are deducted before the charity receives its share of the vehicle sale. The nonprofit receives the resulting proceeds without having to operate the towing, processing, and sales system itself.
Kars4Kids organizes the process differently. Its own staff handles donor outreach and title work while the organization contracts directly with towing companies, auctions, junkyards, and vehicle buyers. Its fundraising operation also includes the advertising used to reach people with unwanted vehicles. The organization’s 2025 federal filing reported no professional fundraising fees.
Kars4Kids also differs from many conventional charities in that it has created a recurring source of charitable revenue from cars that households are ready to dispose of, not from large philanthropic gifts or grants. This places its advertising and vehicle-processing operation at the center of how the charity raises money. Vehicle donations made up about $82 million of Kars4Kids’ roughly $92 million in total revenue in fiscal 2025.
Advertising is especially important to understanding the Kars4Kids model. The organization is trying to reach vehicle owners before they sell to dealers, scrap buyers, or junkyards. Its advertising therefore performs the basic fundraising job of finding donors, even though the requested contribution is a vehicle, not cash.
A program percentage or cost-to-raise-$100 calculation is built on the costs recorded within a charity’s own operation, including whatever fundraising work it takes to generate donations. When a charity handles that fundraising in house and absorbs costs such as towing and vehicle sales itself, without handing them to an outside vendor, those costs flow directly into the ratio.
A direct comparison with an outsourced vehicle program therefore involves two different financial paths. In the outsourced model, roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of gross vehicle-sale proceeds can remain with the outside processor for logistics and administration before the charity receives its share. In the Kars4Kids model, many comparable costs sit inside the fundraising organization and become visible in its expenses.
The available current figures do not provide a clean basis for declaring one model financially superior. They do show why a fundraising ratio can look different depending on whether the charity operates the fundraising machinery itself or receives proceeds after an outside company has already taken its share.
That distinction is important when reading nonprofit financial statements. Fundraising expenses still represent real spending, and program percentages still show how an organization classifies the money it uses. The ratios alone cannot show costs that occur outside the charity before proceeds reach its accounts.
A useful comparison of vehicle-donation charities therefore includes the full path from acquiring the vehicle to converting it into cash and directing that money toward programs. The same fundraising activity can produce very different-looking ratios depending on where the processing costs are recorded.
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