copperbadge:

hcconn:

copperbadge:

shinyrock6498:

Top 10 Corrupt Charities

@copperbadge  this seems to come up on a regular basis for you

Peril of working in and having opinions about the nonprofit sector 😀 

It’s an interesting video – I think it might…almost do better to address the fact that many of these charities have the same major issue, which is that they’re overpaying professional cold-call fundraisers, a problem endemic to certain parts of the industry. Like, great, a list of corrupt charities, but there’s a more systematic problem behind a lot of that corruption and a video about that, combined with a talk about how he did his research, would be immensely more helpful and more useful to people concerned about where and how to give.

But that admittedly doesn’t boil down into a clickbait listicle, or fit appropriately into the theme of “top ten” 😀  

I also look a bit askance at him talking about how much heads of charities make, since that’s a real slippery slope when you’re using it to measure a charity’s effectiveness or legit standing. People deserve to be paid for the work they do and it’s a reality that while many NFP executives do make six figure incomes, that’s what we have to pay them to keep them in the not for profit sector. Remember: for every dollar you pay a fundraiser, they raise an average of five dollars, and generally speaking the head of a charity is also one of its prime fundraisers. Paying a great fundraiser $250K is an immense return on investment. 

Now, these charities seem, from what the video says, to be genuinely bad charities and their executive staff probably (in some cases, obviously) AREN’T earning those salaries. I’m not trying to say someone taking a $250K salary from a charity that’s only giving $20K a year to their service recipients is justifiable. But in a wider sense, using executive pay to bolster your argument about a charity’s effectiveness is really poor practice, especially since then the “well, why should my donation go to pay you instead of to help the needy?” trickle-down fucks over people who don’t make six figures, like me.  

So in all, it’s not a bad video, but it’s an extremely shallow treatment of the topic that borders, in parts, on being harmful to NFPs who aren’t corrupt. 

Couldn’t you help a problem by that by making those 6 figure salary employees commission based? Like giving them a base salary of $55k or so and then they earn a dollar for every four or five dollars they bring in. Then people would know they were actually earning their pay and feel better about donating to that group even if the person had a large salary and you could avoid people’s main concern, that the charity is pulling a Joel Osteen.

Why should they be commission based rather than paid what they’re worth, though? They are earning their pay or they’re fired, just like anywhere else, unless we’re talking about extreme outliers like the ones above, and even then the issue is not their pay but the ratio of their pay to the charity’s outlay on service provision. 990 tax forms for American nonprofits are public on guidestar.org; how much the charity spends on services is on the very first page, and how much they pay their CEO is usually not difficult to find within the form, which requires charities to list their top five paid employees. It’s easy to see when a CEO’s pay so far outstrips the charity’s service offerings – but that doesn’t mean CEO pay on its own is any measure at all of a charity’s work. 

Why should a fundraiser or CEO accept a commission-based salary when their skills will be much more well-compensated if they leave the charitable sector altogether? If we don’t pay a competitive rate, we don’t keep them in non-profit work.

The solution is not “pay less unless they produce immediate results so we look good on paper” – the lasting solution for all concerned is to educate people to stop using CEO pay, or standalone overhead outlay, as a metric of whether a charity is functional or efficient. You don’t judge the quality of your new oven based on the CEO pay of the company that made it or their last quarter’s profits. You read consumer reports, look at reviews, go to the brand websites, ask your friends – it’s the same for charitable giving. But most people don’t want to do the research, which is how you end up with “top ten worst charities” videos that don’t tell you how to find the info he’s using for yourself – it’s just not clickbait enough.