I was planning to donate the couple bucks I had left over from the year to the charity called “San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance”, I was doing a background check on CharityNavigator and they gave the charity full ratings so it seemed good.
Then I stumbled upon the salary section. What the fuck? I earn <20k a year and was planning to contribute to someone’s million dollar salary? WHAT.
How does not giving that ‘cool project’ money do any good?
Well I’m going to give to another charity obviously.
Because I don’t want half my donation to go towards massive salaries.
That’s a reasonable concern. For context, from their 2023 financial report, they spend $391 million on everything they do; even if you add all those salaries you posted together, that’s still about 99 cents out of every dollar going where you want it to go.
I don’t disagree that it’s an obscene salary, but for the most part that’s how the big charities work in the US. You have to either go with small, local charities or shrug and accept that around 1% of your donation will go to someone getting overpaid. It sucks!
Cool. My second option was an australian charity that is running a similar project and their highest salary seems to be 80k USD. So I’ll go with that one.
Top exec salary feels like a weird thing to focus on. Would it be better to donate to a charity with 50 overpaid middle managers rather than one with an obscenely overpaid c-suite? What if they are all reasonably compensated but spend most of the donations on lavish parties for fundraising?
According to charitynavigator 89.9% of their expenses go to their programs, and the rest is used for fundraising, salaries and other admin costs. This feels more reflective of the organization as a whole
I cannot speak for this charity, but it is highly unlikely that individual donations like yours fund those salaries. Often those positions exist to lobby governments and secure large charitable donations. People like that are hire primarily for their contacts. You could hire a qualified “CEO” to run your org for ~$250k, but they likely won’t have Larry Ellison on speed dial or be the god parent of the kid of a senator, etc, etc.
You want to have friends in high places and friends with loads of money if you are fighting for wildlife preservation because otherwise nobody will even acknowledge your existence.
Great, sounds like they didn’t need that donation money since the C-suite will get them all the rich kickbacks they need. So what’s the problem?
A 501c3 has restrictions on lobbying.
They also have limitations on income beyond donations.
This isn’t a Mozilla situation where there are separate corp and org entities. His salary is most definitely funded by donations in some way.
Note: I do agree with your rationale overall. Money is where money is, unfortunately.