Charity bosses salaries

[MsChalloner]

AIBU to think charity bosses shouldn't earn more than the Prime Minister? She appears to earn about £150k. Am I being naive to think this?

Kids company was a prime example. Public services are subject to all kinds of regulation as are the professionals working in them
Kids company wasted far too much public money

I worked for a charity and were subject to several different audits every year, i still cant work out how Kids Company got away with it.
We had to set up a pot for every project we raised funds for , we were not allowed to spend that money on any other project without the donors permission.

I manage a charity. I earn £20k full time. I have a few staff and many volunteers.

I recently applied for a role at another charity, very different to the current one, but one I have supported personally for many years and would involve a relocation 150 miles away. This is a much larger charity, working nationally and internationally to some extent - inevitably because of the sort of work they do, they have a much larger staff. The advertised salary was £75k. I could do that job standing on my head and would actually be less stressful than my current one.

I said in my interview that I wouldn't accept the salary and would want to take far less. They said that wasn't possible, because when at some point they might need to replace me, they would still need to offer that original sort of salary to get the right applicants. I said in which case I would set up a direct debit so that each month I would "donate" £2.5k back to the charity as I wanted them to spend it on doing good work, not large salaries.

I didn't get the job!

I also hate this notion that people who work for charities should do so for pennies. I get really pissed off when people refuse to donate because they read the CEO earns £80k plus. It's about impact. Does this charity improve lives? Is it well run? Is it a good employer? Does it meet its purpose?

The reality is that charity is no longer about a hand up for the poor, special interests or providing extras. Charity is delivering essential services - i.e. my sister's end of life care was managed by McMillan. Where do women go to escape from domestic violence? Where do funds for research into disease come from? Care at home for the elderly is often delivered by charities (saving NHS huge sums of money)

they could find a talented altruistic retired manager

Sorry this is ridiculous! Managers in charities work in excess of 50 hours per week in physically and mentally demanding roles. It's not a "wee hobby" to fill do-gooders time.

I work in the private sector so no special interest in third sector salaries.

As someone who works in the charity sector I have to say I preferred working somewhere where the big boss was only on 5 times my wage. In the private sector it was more like 100 times.

I said in which case I would set up a direct debit so that each month I would "donate" £2.5k back to the charity as I wanted them to spend it on doing good work, not large salaries.

Was it really necessary to tell them that? Would you expect all the staff to work for a pittance or donate their salary back?

Bruffin I have been a supporter of this charity since I was 18 and am now 44. They are one or two charities I send money to on a monthly basis anyway. Of course I don't expect other staff to do that. But I was happy to accept a considerably reduced salary so that the charity could spend £25k per year on doing stuff rather than paying me. As I've been in my current role for 12 years, if I stayed there for 12 years, even allowing for some pay increases, that's a fair chunk of money saved for the charity in that time.

You could have done that shatners and just not told them. I have worked in the charity sector for 15 plus years. If I had interviewed you, I would not have hired you either. I would be worried that you would oppose talented staff being paid a fair wage. I think working for pittance sets a bad example, even if you can personally afford it.

marypoppins if you are really that indispensable then your manager is bloody awful. No organisation can be that dependent on one person, it is appalling bad practice.

Leave the laptop at home.

Belleende Interesting. That suggests you think a salary of £50k is a pittance.

I think you pay the going rate to attract the right talent. It’s all about supply & demand.

You are worth financially, what somebody is prepared to pay you, whether it’s £20M a film for Jennifer Lawrence, £600k per week for Alexis Sanchez, £250k pa as a CEO or 15k as a whatever. I think the charity bit a red herring

YAB extremely silly.

The PM gets paid 150k, yes. The job also comes with the use of a flat in Westminster and a rather large and lovely country pile. Both of which I believe have staff. That would rush you millions more a year if you were paying for it privately. So if you're going to make this argument, use whatever the actual figure is when you add in the extremely high end free accommodation.

(This is before we consider the fact that being PM is a gateway to a lifetime of spectacularly lucrative work once you quit. I don't suppose the CEO of Age Concern or whoever is likely to be stuck for a few quid any time soon either, but having been the PM of the UK is in a different league in terms of the money you can command afterwards).

Now if you want to make an argument that charity bosses should be subject to a blanket top limit of 149k, fine. But tell us why, rather than tying it to a salary that represents only a tiny minority of what a person is actually going to get through being Prime Minister.

I hope for the sake of charitable donors everywhere that some of the posters here are never anywhere near the boards of large charities, since their recruitment policy for chief executive posts boils down to:

• hoping someone wanders in who is qualified to manage at chief executive level;
• hoping that person will do the job for free/a pittance;
• hoping that person will stick around for ten years so you don't have sit a hope for someone else to wander along.

i dont think bellende meant 50k was a pittance, it was the under 20k she was talking about.

Footballers also earn more than the Prime Minister, some of them quite a bit more.

Irrelevant - footballers are paid from private funds.

Still, can't have a discussion about wages without footballers getting an obligatory mention...

Well done, OP, you've been conned by the right wing media. It's ok for companies to pay bosses ££££££ but it's not ok for charities to do the same? Before you start complaining about what charities pay take a look at the figures over time for the pay of company CEOs. Compare that to the pay of the rest of their staff and the performance of the companies. You'll see a huge gulf opening between staff and CEO pay and absolutely no correlation between CEO pay and company performance. Now that's a scandal we should be complaining about.

I think the prime minister is woefully underpaid actually, some secondary school heads earn £100K. How does it make sense that the PM doesn't make much more?

The PM salaries relies on the fact that there are so many fringe benefits and so much status tied up with it that most incumbents come from a background where they don't need the money.

I hope that was as useful for the charity as you think it was shatners.

I've worked in a number where staff refusing to accept their full salary wouldn't necessarily have been particularly helpful. If it's a specifically funded post from a particular pot, they may not have the option of spending it on something else, depending on the restrictions. You're also not necessarily doing the charity any favours getting used to having you for X amount under what they'd likely have to pay to replace you. Because you could leave at any time and you'll definitely leave eventually, and then they might not be able to muster up the income needed to pay for your replacement.

(Obviously none of this may have applied when you did it of course).

It's a lovely generous thing of you to do but I can see why the charity you interviewed for weren't too keen on your proposal. I think I would keep that to myself in future then just do it privately if you get the job.

Yep £20k would be a pittance for mid level manager in a large charity. £50k not a pittance and not far off my salary. I have 15 yrs experience, a PhD, manage an operational budget of £1.5m and a team of 14 people. I could earn £100k plus in the private sector. I think I should be paid more. My workload and responsibilities have massively increased, but my salary has only just kept pace with inflation.

I also suspect male managers on my level get paid more. I would be hugely pissed off if a colleague who could afford to be paid less makes it harder for the rest of us to fight for better pay and conditions.

I think the prime minister is woefully underpaid actually, some secondary school heads earn £100K. How does it make sense that the PM doesn't make much more?

If you factor in the free Westminster pad, country mansion and all the staff it starts to look a bit more generous!

But I know what you mean, with all those hours they have to do, the hourly rate is probably not that impressive. My friend does bank nursing and gets £28 per hour (and deserves every penny) I bet it's not much more than that. But then she won't be able to make millions in after dinner speeches etc soon enough, unlike Mrs May...

Arguably the PM should be paid more (although as a PP said above, they get the grace and favour homes, staff and countless opportunities when they leave). If you compare the salary for a voluntary sector CEO of a large organisation with a comparable private sector firm, the salary would be very different. Why should people have to work for a pittance because they wanted to work in the voluntary sector and do some good? As for the suggestion of getting retirees in for an altruistic few years, It would be like saying head teachers should just be retired teachers and should take on the stress of being responsible for a large organisation out of the goodness of their hearts.

Now clearly it would be inapparopaite for the CEO of a small charity with 3 staff members to be paid a 100k figure but the nature of the role is different. Large charities have a large turnover, employ thousands of staff etc and have to run as a business. There is nothing wrong with preferring to donate to smaller grass roots charities where money is more likely to go on end users than staff (this would be my preference as well). However, it is naive to think the larger charities can or should operate an altruism alone.

We really do need to get away from this idea that charities using volunteers=wonderful. I'll declare my interest now by saying I have volunteered for a charity before and I still do some on an ad hoc basis, and I think it's something that can be very positive. But it isn't always better to have someone in a voluntary capacity.

The thing with volunteers is that we're there to do what we want to do. I've done a lot more of the stuff nobody likes doing when I got paid for it than I did when I've been salaried. Salaries make sure stuff that needs doing gets done.

There's also the issue of commitment. I have come across some very committed volunteers in my time, but the reality is that there aren't many people who are able to make it as important a commitment as it would be if it's what pays the bills. Not many people are in a situation where they have the freedom to prioritise it over earning income and/or caring responsibilities and/or complying with the requirements of the JobCentre.

If you're able to get one of those people, that's great. Quite often though what happens is that people are (perfectly understandably) using it as a bridge back to work or into a career or whatever, and once they're trained up they then take their experience to someone that can pay them for it. Which I don't criticise them for at all, because people have to eat. But that then has an impact on the organisation. This isn't such a problem when the volunteer was doing something relatively unskilled that most people could do with minimal training, like stuffing envelopes or whatever, but it can be when they were engaged in more niche work.

And funders don't tend to like volunteers being in key roles either, probably for the reasons I've just mentioned. It's one thing if it's the Thursday afternoon receptionist, quite another if it's the person responsible for strategic planning.

AIBU to think charity bosses shouldn't earn more than the Prime Minister?

1. The PM is grossly underpaid and the expectation is you can make your money afterwards e.g. on the public speaking, dispute resolution, lobbying circuit etc.

1. Why shouldn't charity bosses be paid a salary consummate with the responsibilities of the role? Like being a CEO of a FTSE250 company.

There is nothing wrong with preferring to donate to smaller grass roots charities where money is more likely to go on end users than staff (this would be my preference as well

It sort of depends what cause you want to help, doesn't it? So for example that makes sense for a food bank, but a charity engaged in medical research or very specialist support to the client base is probably going to have to pay a lot to staff. They're both important so it just depends where your focus is.

Totally agree Beetlejizz

We had a volunteer who volunteered for us in the job she did as a professional capacity before she retired. She made mistakes that affected other staff personally but refused to put them right, took it upon herself to make visits on behalf the charity as a representative which she had no authorisation to do etc
It was much safer in the long run to pay someone to do the job.

The charity I Worked for used volunteers in some roles and they were great but other roles involved years of training to work in a highly specialised field with very vulnerable children it wouldn't be possible to use volunteers, you aren't going to want to see an an unregulated GP, who may or may not have done training a few years ago but fancies feeling useful now. A lot of charities work in highly specialised fields and could not safely be staffed solely by volunteers.