A: The most important thing is actually establishing this thing.

I can’t lay claim to this directly. About eight weeks ago, the Better Business Bureau, Charity Navigator and Guidestar issued a joint news release called The Overhead Myth. It’s an aggressive campaign to really backtrack on this history of teaching the general public to ask about overhead. And now they are saying, “Charities don’t need low overhead; they need high performance.” That was like hell freezing over. That actually happened the same week that the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, and I’m gay, so I thought I was living in an alternative universe.

Q: What revenue percentage of a nonprofit should go to overhead?

A: It varies wildly. That’s why it’s such a bad measure. Amazon goes for six years, doesn’t return any profit. Why? Because there’s a long-term game being played here and everybody has patience. You need a lot more of that in the nonprofit sector to generate scale. What should the overhead be? If it’s an organization that’s got some strategy to, say, home in on the cure for Alzheimer’s, then the overhead ought to be 100 percent for whatever period of that strategy is. If, on the other hand, you are running a local scholarship fund and you don’t have any dream of solving some systemic problem, then your overhead ought to be zero.

Q: You recently floated the idea of an “iTunes for choosing charities.” How would it work?

A: We need a large national apparatus that actually has human beings that do annual audits of every nonprofit functioning in America. We update that on an annual basis. We make that information available in an extremely beautiful user interface.

Q: According to the Charity Defense Council’s website, the organization plans to challenge rules that “violate our First Amendment rights.” What restraint on charity is appropriate? And pick a regulation to eliminate.

A: I would get rid of the need to speak about your results in terms of overhead percentages, which all regulators require. That’s where First Amendment issues come up. I don’t want to speak in terms of overhead percentages. I want to speak in plain English. Oregon just passed legislation that will strip tax-deductible status from any charity that does not return at least 30 percent of its revenues to the cause in the course of three years. Now, that sounds legitimate, and I certainly don’t want to be in the business of protecting bad actors, but you’ve got causes that are very difficult to raise money for — especially causes for the urban poor. They may not have an affluent constituency, so they resort to high-cost fund-raising mechanisms like telemarketers or casino nights. So you are discriminating against them and making it illegal for a charity that does take on an Amazon-like strategy to pursue that strategy.