The Overhead Ratio Is Lying to You — I Built an AI Tool to Prove It

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition What I Built GlassPocket — a tool that argues against the "overhead ratio," the dominant heuristic people use to judge charities (what % of donations go to "programs" vs. "overhead" like staff and infrastructure). That heuristic punishes exactly the investment that makes a charity effective, and it drives what nonprofit finance people call the "starvation cycle" — orgs under pressure to look lean end up under-staffed and under-resourced. You search a US 501(c)(3), and instead of a single overhead percentage, GlassPocket pulls their IRS Form 990 history (via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer API) and shows: Reserve months — how long the org could run on savings alone (low reserves = fragile, not "lean") Operating margin trends across up to 13 years of filings Staff-investment share — reframed as capacity, not waste Fundraising cost per dollar raised — a narrower, more honest efficiency metric than the classic ratio A peer-percentile chart against ~70 similar organizations in the same category A Gemini-written "myth-buster" card pairing each overhead-ratio assumption with what the numbers actually show A grounded chat box — ask follow-up questions about that specific org's finances, answered only from its own filing data Demo Live app: https://glasspocket.vercel.app/ Code hassan-2050 / glasspocket Overhead-ratio myth buster for US charities — Form 990 data via ProPublica, Gemini narrative generator GlassPocket — Overhead Myth Buster Live: glasspocket.vercel.app Category: Overall Winner + Best Use of Google AI (Gemini-powered narrative generator and chat) The Hook Most charity-rating tools reinforce the harmful "overhead ratio" myth. This contrarian tool argues against that dominant heuristic by reframing efficiency around outcomes and reserves. What It Does You search a US charity by name, and it pulls their IRS Form 990 history to generate a plain-English context-aware financial explainer that debunks the o