Salaries of Employees from "non-profit charity" I was going to donate too

This is more of a system issue than bad behavior of an individual charity.

Charities can underpay a little bit, because working for a charity has its own appeal. But if you want a talented, experienced person to run your org, you have to consider what they could make if they worked for someone else. San Diego is not a cheap city, and has its fair share of CEO positions.

If you really want to stretch your dollar though, local food banks are probably a better bet.

https://sandiegozoowildlifealliance.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/2023-SDZWA-Annual-Report.pdf

Total revenue per year is 420 million.

Concessions and cleaning staff typically make 35k-40k. Zookeepers ~50k.

These 5 employees. Amount to .8% of the yearly operating budget, while the sum of all other employees totals up to 10% of the 400 million dollar operating budget.

I’m not making any judgements, just offering the numbers.

This is a good reminder that you can look up Form 990 for any nonprofit (they are required to submit one), which includes any staff that make over $100k.

https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/

Also, it looks like the “salaries” you found are total compensation, which also includes medical and retirement benefits. The CEO’s salary is around $600k, but also got a $300k+ bonus.

For a second I thought this was a hit list.

My wife works for a non-profit where the Executive Director (CEO if you will) cannot make more than 5x what the lowest paid person makes. Wish more non-profits would adopt something similar

You earn less than 20k? Save your money, volunteer your time! Much more productive and rewarding!

Blood banks. “Your blood saves lives”. Is actually “We can sell your blood to hospitals for $200 per pint”. Check the salaries of the non-profit blood bank CEO and board. I would gladly share my blood if I’m paid $100 per pint, or if they gave insurance vouchers for a free pint of blood, to avoid insurance charging $1000-3000 to get a pint back. In fact they could just call it “blood insurance” where your premium is paid in regular blood donations.

I’ve given up on charity. They’ve lobbied sites like Charity Navigator to not count executive compensation as a negative. I’m sick of capitalism ruining everything.

Charities and billionaires are the polar extremes of the same policy failure. In a healthy society neither should exist, and when they do they should be tolerated for a minimal time as possible.

Charities and philanthropy exist to permit governments and corporations to abdicate their social responsibilities.

When the work a charity does is properly valued by a society, it’s economy would never need to carve out a special, nonprofit status for it.

Was put to me at a young age that non-profit only means they spend any revenue they get before it gets to the bottom line to show up as a gain or loss. Always good to sort out the shady from the legit.

I'm one of the money guys at a nonprofit. You wouldn't believe the vast corruption I have seen. Our president recently asked: "how did it get to this point?" He knew the fucking answer.

What the heck is a chief philanthropy officer?

Give it to the San Diego food bank instead. It's a good charity from what I've seen, and I've volunteered there at least half a dozen times.

I took a huge pay cut when I worked for a non profit. :(

Mutual aid is where it's at.

Charities are good business. That's why there are a lot of them.

No affiliation, and I've never donated to them, but their financials are far from the worst:

There are many charities that don't spend the majority of donations on the actual program. Like, wtf...

Damn I'm in the wrong nonprofit lol. Building, activity and pay & benefits for 7 employees come in under $400k total budget/expenses and we have distributed millions and millions of pounds of food in the last few years.

This is why I always tell donation canvasers to shove it and make their rich ceo pay for it in full. Nothing worse then a billionaire CEO for loblaws underpaying someone to ask for handouts.

I basically refuse to assist any and all charities at this point because of exactly what you have shown in your images. It's disgusting.

Management and marketing bloat is extremely common for nonprofits, unfortunately. Especially large ones.

Ones that don't do that exist too, but it's a thing you have to be wary of.

The head of the American Red Cross makes about 750k, last I heard.

Whether or not that's justified either, I think we can all agree it's a little bit larger of an organization with more responsibility to juggle.

I suggest donating to your local wild animal rescue/rehabber. They're all volunteer based. They receive $0 public money. The public rarely sees the work they do. They're doing physically and mentally taxing work purely for the love of animals.

They typically all have a donation page, and many have Amazon Wishlists where you can send them cleaning, maintenance, or medical supplies directly if you're worried about the money going to something you might not intend.

Nothing will go to people. You won't have to question if you're really help an animal that may or may not exist in a country you'll never see. They're your neighborhood animals.

As the !superbowl@lemmy.world person here, I look specifically for a raptor rehabbers to donate to, and I share links to those rescues worldwide.

I can't find my link to the world rescue database, but for a US based one, you can look here or just Google up "wild animal rescue near me" and you should get some options.

It would be nice if organisations were run by people who were so dedicated to the job that they'd do it for free or at least on a survival wage, but it is difficult to find someone with both the right qualifications and the willingness to do it cheaply.

The figures aren't outrageous for those positions and as a non-profit they do have a board who made the decision to pay those amounts.

It's not like a private company where the owner/CEO can just grab the money. The board members voted to hire someone and offered those amounts.

If you want to change this kind of thing, you need to attend the annual meeting in which the board is elected. I've been elected to a few board positions in non-profit organisations and let me tell you: It's really easy to get on a board. Most places have difficulties filling the positions or you can easily outcompete other candidates simply by wanting to be there. It's boring as fuck, but important stuff sometimes happens and it's a good experience to have.

So if you want to actually contribute to that non-profit, you might want to save your few dollars and instead give them some of your time to help them in the right direction. Assuming you're dedicated to the cause in the first place that is. If you have something to say, you will be heard, because quite frankly, half the board members only come for the free food.

Here's the thing: I don't know about this charity in particular. But in general, a big charity is just as complicated a business as a big for profit company.
The task of managing it isn't any easier. So the people who have experience in managing big businesses can get that kind of money elsewhere, too.
In our system, the charity is pretty much forced to pay competitive CEO salaries if they want experienced people at the helm.
If they paid much less, they wouldn't get anyone to do the job who's actually competent.

Indeed , disgusting and out of control. Start taxing their asses.

Okay, so think about it like this:

Suppose your job is making wooden chairs. It's takes you the exact same skills to make a wooden chair to sell for profit, as it does to make a wooden chair to donate to a chairless children's charity, right? So why would you spend all your time and skills doing a job that's eventually going to bankrupt you? While you might do a few chairs because you feel like it's morally right, the bulk of your work is going to be selling chairs because that's how you sustain yourself.

CEOs are in the same situation. A 500-person for-profit company takes the exact same skill set to run as a 500-person non-profit. So the reality is that non-profits need to either be competitive in pay with for-profits, or they have to be attractive in ways other than compensation so they can entice CEOs to work for them.

Now, none of that is to say that the scale of CEO compensation is appropriate, because it's not. But that's the calculus a non-profit has to make.

Every dollar you give feeds an animal.

Philanthropy officer getting paid the least, right behind the actual zoo director.

for me its more like whats the lowest paid worker. Nowadays you are going to have trouble under six figures in any major city and the ceo is not much over 10x that. Now I doubt the lowest paid worker makes that but it would be great if they did.

That's why I'm very picky about donating. When I was at my very first job, pushing 1200 packages an hour at UPS for hourly wages, I donated to the United Way via payroll deduction. I was listening to the news in my car when I heard the CEO of United Way took his family on a $2M vacation. I had that payroll deduction removed on the very next shift.

Wow, that's crazy. I just checked out my local zoo and there are only 2 executives with a pay package of $200k. The rest are unpaid trustees.

Unpopular opinion: Charities should be morally allowed to compete for top talent on a financial basis.

Damn, my work at a non profit yields me free coffee and water. I think I'm underselling myself

It's not exactly the charities fault.

The real issue is that for profit companies can pay their CEOs this much, which means charities have to compete if they want a good CEO too.

In reality we should be cracking down on companies hoarding wealth towards to their CEOs at exorbitant rates, that way charities won't have to pay a wage like this just to function and even hire a CEO.

Do you live in San Diego? It's incredibly expensive to live there; that said, these pays are far to fucking high even for SD.

Wow, no wonder they don't make a profit 🙃

A guy that came in as an LPO to a company I worked for used to brag about his last job. He worked for a non-profit and his whole entire job was to find ways to make money off of it. Tax loopholes, legal scams, etc. He said it was his favorite job because it was like solving a puzzle every day.

So gross.

Anyway, the top brass really liked him and followed all his plans for our company. Now it is in Mexico and the main facilities are shut down.

Is there a site which documents all charities and flags misuse of funds and such?

How do we know donations will go where expected?

To me this is par for the course. Corpos steal from you before you get it (wage theft), and "charity" manipulates you into the same, but you're a "willing" participant in the process of having your money taken.

Pretty much everyone who is classifiably "rich" has gotten there by taking a small amount from a large number of people, usually on an ongoing timeline. The formula hasn't changed. If you don't have a hundred people giving you a small amount consistently, you're probably not going to become rich.

A quick Google shows there expense ratio is 86% which I think isn't horrible.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/951648219

Same in the UK - and in part it's encouraged by the regulatory body, the Charity Commission to ensure competent senior staff. (Not usually as high as the example you give, but certainly most large charities pay senior grade around £100k and upwards.

You can kind of see that point, but most people would be shocked and dismayed to know how little difference their individual donation makes.

I always encourage people to check this information as you've done for your country before donating. Many charities can do a huge amount of good with small donations, but it's the big ones that can make effective change through lobbying.

But the more cynical amongst you will realise that charities exist on paper to solve problems. There is an inherent contradiction that if they do solve those problems, everyone that works for them is suddenly out of work.

I earn <20k a year

Could I ask what you do for a living or what field of work you're in?

If paying a CEO $200k more makes the charity $2 million more, it's a no-brainer. Billionaires love to give to animal-related causes, so that's easily plausible.

In reality of course, predicting the amounts of money a CEO will bring in is virtually impossible, so it becomes a nepo-baby-fest like everything else. People with rich connections are in high demand at pretty much every entity that has a need to raise money, so they cost a lot.

Then of course you have the problem that in the wider scope, this reality creates an arms-race between charities for fundraising potential that diverts from the causes themselves. The only real solution to that problem is to punish charities that pay their officers too much by not giving them money.

I'd like to be "chief philanthropy officer" as well.

While not ideal, I would like to note that the charity has a revenue of 392 M$. Spending 1-2% on salaries of top exec is not that bad if it prevents them from misusing the funds. A lot of the time, the alternative to high salaries for people in power is those people giving in to corruption since the risk/benefit encourages it. Just look at politics for an example.

That being said, wtf is chief philanthropy officer?!