If you’ve ever been told to keep “overhead” low, this conversation might change your entire fundraising playbook. Allison sits down with grant-writing powerhouse Melanie Palmer to unpack the long-standing myth that administrative costs should be separate from program costs, and reveals a better way to budget, report, and raise money that actually fuels impact.

We dig into how 990 categories and charity watchdogs nudged the sector into chasing ratios with no evidence behind them. Melanie shares a practical, test-anywhere definition: a program expense is anything your program cannot function well without. With that lens, leadership, accounting, audits, rent, utilities, insurance, technology, and communications are not extras; they’re the backbone that keeps services alive. You’ll hear a stark pandemic story of a nonprofit that avoided an “admin” hire, overloaded program staff with accounting tasks, and lost a generation of talent, causing a break in services for people who needed help most.

Then we get tactical. You’ll learn how to build full-cost program budgets by adding one internal step: allocate your board-approved total costs across each program using reasonable, documented methods (time allocation for staff, square footage for facilities, and logical drivers for shared services). Think of it as Lego budgeting; you’re not adding bricks, just arranging them by function. We cover how to present these budgets in grants and major gifts, invite donor restrictions without hiding true costs, and reframe stewardship conversations around outcomes and sustainability rather than arbitrary ratios. Along the way, we share templates, training ideas for boards, and simple scripts to educate corporate funders who already fund their own operations without apology.

If you’re ready to move from scarcity to clarity and raise what your mission actually requires, this episode gives you the language, the model, and the courage. Subscribe, share with your team, and leave a review to help more nonprofits fund impact, not ratios.