To feel outraged at my friends re charity salaries?

[Pissedoffandbored]

Have a group chat going with a load of my girlfriends. There have been some additions to the group chat this week, some I know well and others are just acquaintances. One girl I don’t know sent a link to published salaries for charities. Girl didn’t know I work for a National Charity in a senior position and slated the amount I earn saying people don’t deserve to earn more than PM. At this point I interjected making her aware of my position and she proceeded to have a go at me. I defended my position but most of my friends agreed I earned too much since I worked for a charity.

So AIBU to be pissed off? Also, is this the general consensus or are my mates just dick heads?

It will be the fundraisers doing all the hard graft and fundraising.

Obviously 🙄 the CEO’s job isn’t to fundraise, it’s to run the company. Just like the shop assistants in Tesco ‘do all the hard graft and stack shelves and serve customers’, but the CEO of Tesco is clearly going to be paid more.

They could sack OP and donate her salary this year, and then next year when they don’t raise nearly as much money because of inefficient management they could rehire her I suppose.

Yanbu

Realistically you have to pay for talent.

I think as long as it's a reasonably large charity that's fine and to be expected. If it's your local church/hospital charity then no way!

Pissedoffandbored
You can sleep at night because you're worth every penny in your eyes.

A few questions:
How much of your front line work is done by volunteers?
Does your charity encourage voluntary work as a way to 'gain experience' in the hope of a paid position?
Of your front line paid positions, how many are salaried vs hourly paid?
What percentage of your workforce are on a low wage or national minimum wage?
Does your charity ensure that every professional who works for you is paid accordingly?
Do all workers have a reasonable pension plan, sick pay, maternity pay?

Unless the people on the lowest rung of the hierarchy are being adequately supported then I can't get behind a CEO claiming they can sleep at night happy they are worth every penny.

Advertising for a BUYING position, not a biting one. That's what you get when you type on your phone without your specs on.

A lot of charities I’ve had anything to do with (in a volunteer/advisory role) that pay below market rates have had poor systems, terrible management and high staff turnover because of aforesaid low pay, shit systems and terrible management. They could do exponentially more good if they were better run and had stronger leadership (and on occasion I have helped them to a small proportion of that in my specialist field).

150k could feed so many people in a poor country. Not sure which type of charity you work for but I don't think anyone should get more than 40k.

Someone on £40k, running a large national or international charity, with likely limited experience of running a large, complex organisation with more that one function, is likely to piss away far more than £150k in inefficiency, poor practice and ineffective marketing and fundraising.

Charities are important. I want someone who will do the job well. Absolutely money should be pumped into a strong staff and encourage retention for the benefit of the charity and constantly those it serves.

The PM comparator is never a valid one, given that the PM gets a house in London plus a country house. More materially, a PM can expect to make a fortune in retirement from part time directorships, public speaking, newspaper articles, memoirs, etc.

A lot of charity “project officers” earn really really crap salaries. So if you run an org with a load of highly committed staff working over f/t hours with antisocial working patterns due to community engagement work and insecure contracts you’re paying them around the £20k mark for years and years of experience then I do think £150k is too much sorry.

I've just totally stopped giving to charity. You give them an amount each month and they are constantly wanting more and want me to leave my property to them when I'm gone.

Friend volunteered to work in a charity shop, she was the only one who wasn't getting paid.

Another friend was an executor for a will, house and contents spilt between two charities, around 2008 during the financial crisis, house sale pulled at the last minute, it didn't raise as much as they wanted.

I once did some quite expensive training, out of town. A few other participants were from a well known charity. They spent the train journey back home plotting their next employment move using their newly learnt skills.
I've never given to that charity since.

It’s the level of volunteers that work for these charities that make me cross with the high salaries the executives take

Paying 150k pa for a brilliant CEO may well generate an additional 100k over the year

I would expect a brilliant CEO to generate a lot more than 100K, that wouldn't even cover their salary.

YANBU. Most people have no idea of the skills it takes to run an organisation, and how rare those skills are.

Kids Company being a good example - relatively low CEO salary, but bucketloads of questionable perks (so no transparency) and utterly incompetent. If you think professionals are expensive, try hiring amateurs.

Having said that IME most charities don’t have a performance culture, so you get brilliant, hard working people motivated by the cause, but a fair amount of passengers who are never managed because everyone’s too “nice”, ignoring the fact it’s lettng down the actual cause.

OP you were never going to get a positive response on here. To many people a salary of 150k is just beyond comprehension.

I'm a senior nurse, and earn about 45k. My job is stressful, but I'm not responsible for a multi million pound budget and hundreds of staff. If I was, I'd expect to be paid a hell of a lot more. But clearly lots of people on here disagree, so there you go.

museumum
I'm in agreement with you.

I've seen lots of charity jobs that have poor salaries, no pensions, zero hours etc.
I've had friends apply for jobs only to be told they didn't have enough experience foe the job, but there's a voluntary position doing 2/3 job which could help them. Obviously the latter is free. The charity couldn't possibly pay a 0.6 part time salary for it.

Meanwhile someone at the top pays themselves a fortune and pats themselves on the back for what a great person they are. The more I hear, the more I'm cynical about large charities.

I have worked for a local office of a national charity for thirty years. We get paid little more than minimum wage, pensions were unheard of until auto enrolment and we were nearly forced to take a pay cut when they came in. Sick pay is a few weeks then SSP only. At one time we had reasonable holiday leave at 5 weeks per year, but thats almost normal now as the rest fo the work has caught up. I haven't had a pay rise since 2014. Im not sure who's getting these big salaries but its certainly not the of us doing the actual work.

150k could feed so many people in a poor country

And how do you suppose it will get there, if all the people who know how to run a huge multinational organisation have been sacked because their wages were too high?

I volunteer on the board of a small local charity. As a board we've got a fairly wide range of skills and experience, but I'm not so naive as to think that we could actually do the charity's day to day work. We pay people who know what they're doing for that. That IS the charity: it's an organisation that raises money and makes things happen with it, and those things don't happen for free.

What exactly do the public want? They dint want anyone in a salaried position in a charity to be earning decent money. They want 100% of their donations to go to the "cause". But all charities need salaried staff to manage the accounts, distribute funds, csmpaign.

But yeah, let's sack all the paid staff over £20k a year and the next time there's a tsunami or volcano we'll get Beryl who does the till on a Monday morning to sort out the international logistics. Or we'll ask Peter who drives the van to decide what the next priorities should be for cancer research.

That'll work amazingly well.

My BIL runs a charity. He has an enormous house, new cars, holidays, so many gadgets... his kids have all the gadgets and sports gear... they have cleaners, oh all the stuff... so much waste as well as everything has to be new. I think he pays himself too much.

@BernadetteRostankowskiWolowitz

At that rate of return the charity is still losing out! I totally get that you have to have competent management etc, but ops attitude grinds my gears with a nice slice of patronising how great am I thrown in !

@overnightangel
Couldn’t agree more.
@Pissedoffandbored Which charity do you work for?

I wouldn’t donate to Oxfam after finding our their top exec a salaries and that they were buying up multiple luxury houses around the Home Counties.

It always amazes me that we, apparently, have to pay high salaries to get the best people for the job for those at the top yet that doesn't apply to those working in healthcare, with children, etc and all those jobs we regard as important.
I would consider £150k+ as excessive and distasteful for a charity I'm afraid