Anyone involved in charity/ministry/philanthropic work should read this article from the Freaknamics guys in the NYT Magazine. A few highlights:

“On every mission, 500 or 600 children would show up begging for treatment,” Mullaney recalls, “but we could only help 150.” In a small Vietnamese village near the Chinese border, there was one kid who played soccer every day with the volunteers; they took to calling him Soccer Boy. When the mission was over and Mullaney and the others drove away, he saw Soccer Boy chasing after the group’s bus, his cleft lip still unrepaired. “We were in shock — how could he not have been helped?” That’s when Mullaney realized that charities like Operation Smile were badly in need of a new business model — or any business model at all, really — and he set out to invent one.

The system is just not designed to solve this problem.” The cancer-research community, he felt, was made up of countless well-meaning individuals who, collectively, turned into a hive of competing interests and misaligned incentives, where financing dollars and even information were hoarded.

Smile Train works as a charity because it is run like a business. Fixing a child’s cleft lip or palate is a relatively cheap procedure with outsize payoffs: cleft children in many countries are ostracized and have a hard time going to school, getting jobs and marrying, and the surgery reverses those disadvantages. Indeed, when pitching a reluctant government, Mullaney refers to cleft children as “nonperforming assets” who can soon be returned to the economic mainstream. He fights bad incentives with better ones: when Smile Train learned that midwives in Chennai, India, were being paid off to smother baby girls born with cleft deformities, Mullaney started offering midwives as much as $10 for each girl they instead took to a hospital for surgery.

Hopefully that's enough to whet your appetite to read the whole article.