Trying to summarise, and be helpful.
Charities need to be well organised and well-run. They are custodians of donations, which money they are trusted to use to fulfill their charitable purposes.
Well-run charities, like any organisation, need to plan and budget. If they have programmes that run over time/indefinitely (like a rolling vaccine programme and health education, rather than say, building something) they need to ensure they will have, and continue to have a steady cash flow to fund operations, including paying the people who deliver those programmes.
That cash flow has to come from somewhere. Unless you are one of the fortunate charities like the Wellcome Trust or GOSH with tens of millions in the bank, that money comes from fundraising.
Generally, charities will have different income streams, to reduce the risk the cash will dry up. These can include regular giving by individual donors, or corporate partners, getting bequests from wills, one- off appeals and donations from high-net worth individuals, like Prince Harry.
A charity would be badly advised to put a huge amount of reliance on just the high net worth individuals. They may hit a bad year (financiers after the 2008 crisis for example), may fall from grace (some big former benefactors are currently in jails but of course they could just be cancelled) or they may develop a new, superseding interest. All charities would love to have a regular big private donor like George Michael was to the NSPCC, but they are very rare.
All fundraising opportunities take work to turn them into actual cold hard cash. The charity needs to have a profile, needs to have a way to get its stories out there, needs to build a platform to attract donors. Some do it just because of the nature of their work (average people are probably pretty well-disposed to donate to the RNLI for example, or the Air Ambulances). Others need to create some kind of draw. Glamour and the chance to experience a bit of a luxury lifestyle is one of those.
To do any of this though, charities need good, honest, professional and skilled staff. Accountants, CFOs, fundraisers, content creators etc etc. If you don’t bother with that on the basis you just want to get the cash out there, you end up with a Camilla Batmanjelidh type running an organisational shambles with no records. And if you’re not getting regular government funding, as she was, you’ll run out of money.
So any professional charity is always going to spend a lot of money on it’s staff. It’s normally the biggest cost for any organisation, why would a charity be any different? And Zi don’t work for free, so why should they? People working in the third sector already get paid less than they would in the private sector.
So, I don’t find it at all odd that Sentable continues to host events like this. The global brand awareness it raises must be invaluable to them, let alone the money it brings in even after the costs are deducted.