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.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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!
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.
gex@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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