Where do your donations go?
From CNN Correspondent Jim Boulden
(CNN) -- Aid agencies have raised an unprecedented amount of money to go to areas affected by the tsunamis.
Within 24 hours of the disaster, Christian Aid was asked by a local Indian charity to fund half of a US$2 million project to cloth and feed 50,000 families.
Two days later, Christian Aid had received $700,000 from the British government for the project, and the remainder is coming from donations.
The charity has raised over $100,000 just through its Web site, and almost twice that through phone donations.
Christian Aid's John Davison says money is the best possible donation.
"The simplest way of putting it is that a money wire transfer is the fastest way of getting assistance to these areas, faster than your fastest jet is just sending money," he told CNN.
"Then the people on the ground know what they've got to work with; they can then go and purchase the items that they need and set about distributing them."
Many Western charities donate funds to local charities, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars chartering flights from the West.
"You need to be able to buy local stuff, locally generated stuff to get most value for your money and then you need the transportation to get it there," Davison says.
"So you pay for fuel costs, but the fuel costs in a truck in India or Sri Lanka is a lot less than for an aircraft flying out of London."
Christian Aid says it spends two percent of its funds on administrative costs, and in this case about 90 percent raised with go straight to the people affected.
"You do get quite a lot of bang for your buck," Davison says.
In the United States, there is a wide variation in the efficiency of charities' spending.
AmeriCares has low expenses, and normally $99 out of every hundred goes to relief, but in this case the charity says everything will go towards assistance.
"We've greatly benefited by the fact that we have wonderful relationships with most of the world's pharmaceuticals and medical equip companies, so that means that an awful lot of the things we get are donated to us," AmeriCares president Curt Welling says.
The American Red Cross -- the giant of U.S. relief agencies -- spends $300 million dollars a year on administration and fundraising, but is still relatively efficient.
Out of every hundred, $91 goes towards assistance -- at home and overseas -- the charity says.
Save the Children also has the same donation to expenses ratio, whereas Medicins sans Frontiers has very low administrative costs and relies instead on volunteers.
It accepts no money from the U.S. government, and so spends dearly on fundraising.
As a result, $85 in every hundred donated goes towards aid, but that's slightly below the average for international relief organizations.
Those who track relief groups say it's not cheap providing aid in the Third World.
"Well, you gotta remember that these are organizations that have staffs to support and activities to run, so you can't expect them to have no overhead costs," Robert Ottenhoff, President & CEO, Guidestar, told CNN.
Oxfam concedes its ongoing projects overseas are labor-intensive, as is its fund-raising on college campuses, which is why during normal times, just $77 in every $100 is directed towards assistance programs.
Charity rules in Britain state money raised has to be spent on a specific appeal.
"These are the people who have these operations to coordinate in the first place, Davison says of the local charities it works with.
"They recruit the volunteers, they organize the teams, they decide where they are going and they organize the logistics of actually moving the stuff which is what you need.
Christian Aid says that because of the huge amount raised and the huge task ahead, it will be spending money on this disaster for up to three years.
CNN's Allan Chernoff in New York contributed to this report.
"It's the greatest and biggest aid effort in the world -- a scale never tried before." 
