” Wouldn’t $35 million spent directly on poor people, for example, go much further than $35 million minus tens of millions of overhead expenses, with then only half left to help people?”
Your mistake is that you assume that there would be $35,000,000 without the $14,000,000 spent to get it.
Because of the type of donations received, old cars, they would never receive any of it. So the correct way to look at it is sort of cost of goods sold. They have to report both, the funds raised and the costs (including the click through costs which are several dollars a click) at the gross amounts. In the car donation programs the fair way to evaluate would be to report just the net amount raised. There are amounts that are required to be spent because of the copious reporting requirements and the balance was spent for the programs.
You can hardly call the funds spent to directly acquire such donations as wasted. There is very much a direct correlation of what comes in to what is spent.
In short, if they didn’t spend what they did raising the money, they would not have it all. Specifically here where they are converting what would be an unusable commodity into funds they can use to further their programs. Its a true win-win situation.