[module0000]

> This attitude frustrates me.

CEO's making market-wages (100k+) "working for charity" frustrates me. At that wage, they aren't charity workers at all. Every dollar they accept is someone remaining underfed, while the CEO gets resume-flair.

Protip: Charity's do not need a CEO in the sense that a company pushing a product to market needs a CEO to manage various business units. They need someone who cares about the net impact to the impoverished at reasonable expense to themselves.

[ska]

Your protip is naive.

I'm not saying there isn't any excessive pay in some charities. But the management needs of an organization are not determined by the goods or services being supplied by that organization so much as by the complexity of the organization. It's not somehow fundamentally easier to manage a charity than it is a product company of similar scale and size.

Now, there can be unwarranted complexity of course, but some of this is a natural outgrowth of scaling and reach. So just like in private sector, charity organizations have a huge range of needs. Running MSF is very different than running a local independent food bank.

From my limited personal experience, charity sector executives tend to be paid a fair bit less than they would in private sector work, but still at a reasonable scale for experience an skills.

This is exactly what you want: someone capable of doing the work well, who demonstrably cares enough about it that it as made a financial impact on them. Otherwise you are effectively suggesting that it is better for the organization to be inefficient and waste its donations, so long as the people heading it are also "donating" their time. You can hope for somebody good who is financially secure and doesn't need the salary, but it would be foolish to count on.

There is one other issue, which is the question of whether or not larger scale charity organizations are (or can be) more efficient at delivering meaningful impact than smaller, localized one. That seems like a good target for some proper research. If the answer is that larger organizations are better at it, then clearly there is a benefit to having them run well. And caring about the impact is nowhere near enough qualification to do that.

[Retric]

It's not somehow fundamentally easier to manage a charity than it is a product company of similar scale and size.

This is empirically false.

Companies fail far more frequently than similar charities do. The core reason for this is companies operate on a much smaller margins. A charity that distributed 90% of it’s donations last year could distribute 80% if it’s donations this year if they collect half as much. Combined with often significant endowments and failure is rarely a major concern. Companies on the other hand are almost never in those situations.

[aeternus]

Most of the larger charities simply spend more of their budget on marketing. Is that desirable, and should the charity leadership be compensated handsomly for that?

It's a tough question as they may just be redirecting money away from charities with less marketing spend.

[flatline]

100-200k seems like a perfectly reasonable salary for someone working in the non-profit sector in a high-level management capacity, assuming there is some need for these types of skills, which there certainly are for many non-profits. Presumably that same individual could make anywhere from 300k to many millions as the CEO of a private company. Yes, you may be able to get someone for less, you may even be able to get someone fully qualified for less who is really invested in the mission of the non-profit, but such an individual becomes vanishingly irreplaceable at some point.

On the other hand a small non-profit with a half a dozen employees probably has greater need of a competent accountant.

[cannonedhamster]

I made more than 100k as a software support tech with no management experience and minimal college. Not sure that amount measures up in every locale. 100k for a CEO of a large charity seems pretty low.

[Retra]

Just because you work for a charity doesn't mean your work is itself charity. If you're collecting money to buy food for people, you still pay for the food, you're not demanding that the growers and packagers of that food simply give it away. Thus they still work to produce the food, and still make the market rate for that work. There's no reason anyone working at any organization should work for less than market rate.

[andreilys]

The CEO making 100k+ could likely be making 400k+ in the private sector.

They've already taken a 75% paycut, at a certain point you're not going to attract the talent necessary to do great work. The difference between an A-player and a C-player is vast, and sometimes you need to compensate higher to attract the A-players that will have a transformative impact on the charity.

[robocat]

Plenty of studies show there may be no correlation between CEO pay and their performance! Have a look through the results of: https://www.google.com/search?q=ceo+pay+correlation

Another example was the guy that built a successful baseball team from low paid players (what was the book called?) which showed low pay did not mean low performance in a discipline where outcomes could be measured (much easier than CEO, so you would expect better correlation of pay with performance for sports).

Edit: Moneyball (baseball is as foreign to me as rugby is to Americans?).

[1shooner]

Is your 'pro' tip based on either data or anecdotal observation?

My experience with non-profits (granted, not 'pro' since I wasn't being paid) is that organizations that limit their capacity to amateurs and volunteers also significantly limit their impact.

[phil248]

What? Every organization that wants to grow and thrive needs leadership. And getting and keeping good leadership requires offering fair compensation. Do you disagree?

[eitland]

Yes. Disagree.

I think in many cases the right candidate for a non profit is someone who cares deeply enough to take a pay cut to work there.

[jvanderbot]

There is absolutely no requirement that workers at a charity must work for charity. You're clearly confused about mission versus methods.

Are there bad methods with good missions? Yes. Are there bad missions with good methods? Yes (most for-profit companies fit here).

Furthermore, CEO salary is one of the most dismal metrics. UNICEF USA's CEO is often in chain-letter-type posts about CEO salary, yet UNICEF USA raises gobs of money for highly successful programs saving millions of lives per year in developing countries. UNICEF vaccinates somewhere near half of the worlds children. Half.

Somehow, hiring talent seems over-rated. This seems related to "efficiency" which is % of dollar going to "programming". Fine salaries paid to employees is cash they cannot hand out to homeless. I get it.

It's usually not those trade-offs that reduce "efficiency". There's a ton misunderstanding about what "programming" is. If a company installs a landing strip to fly in 10 years of supplies, have they spent that money on "programming" or "overhead"?

The worst offenders, in my opinion, are the tiniest hobby non-profits that do virtually nothing. If I fly to the third world and install a well for some people, have I done real good? Perhaps! If I hand out food once a year around thanksgiving, have I? yes! But that labor, effort, and money may have been better invested in policy changes or continuing-support programs. In almost all cases I've seen, the tiny non-profits bemoan the cost of doing this compared to the larger non-profits. Why are some programs more expensive when implemented at a larger non-profit? The main reason is they include this "extra" work such as publicity, policy, continuing support, and yes, hiring good people so they can do better next year with more money.

Any business-minded person will tell you that you must reinvest in your organization to do more. What that more is might be up for debate (the mission), but to avoid self-investment is to have a bad method.