“Questo è il motivo per cui le persone non stanno più donando”: gli stipendi a sei cifre dei CEO di beneficenza dei CEO di beneficenza
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/15/the-controversial-row-over-charity-ceos-six-figure-salaries/
di GnolRevilo
16 commenti
I’m sure they all do a very good job and when I’m next stopped in the street by a canvasser, I’ll be sure to bring it up as they ask me for my bank details as I walk back home from buying at the local charity shop.
Bags on show.
This has a ridiculous headline but surprisingly it isn’t a ridiculous article. It points out:
*Oxfam, for example, brought in more than £300 million last year, employed 4,000 staff and 20,000 volunteers and ran more than 500 shops. This makes the CEO’s £125,000 salary seem rather low, particularly when you compare it with what an equivalent-sized private company would probably be paying for a CEO role – probably somewhere between £500,000 and £1 million a year.*
and
*While there are many charity executives on very healthy salaries, those who receive remuneration in the high six or even seven figures usually work for companies that don’t rely on donations from the public. This includes the Wellcome Trust, a charity that makes its money from an investment portfolio.*
I recall reading something like 5p out of every £1 donated is all that ends up going to the actual cause in plenty of charities.. seems to me like terrible value for money. I’d never donate to charity because there’s no good way to know who’s donating the majority vs who is using the majority to fund campaigning and salary vs actually doing good work to help end starvation (which is going on decades later after many pledges to stop it).. seems like a good way to waste your hard earned/heavily taxed earnings. I’d rather play the lottery.
Good luck getting a top quality CEO for 5 figures. It’s tough to stomach but the reality is C level paid are on top notch pay. If you want quality you need to at least attempt to compete.
Been going on for years, biggest scammers out there.
I stopped giving to large charities for this very reason 25 – 30 years ago. I was a truck driver and had the job with a couple of other guys I worked with to go to Cancer Research in London to move them about a 1/3 of a mile. While waiting to start the move I glanced out the window into the car park. It was full of luxury cars. We moving filing cabinets and I said why are they moving a third of a mile down the road expecting the answer to be the lease is up. It was a simple answer. Postcode W1 to WC1. All we moved was the files. The rest of it which was perfectly good was skipped. The cars were all directors and the CEO and so on. When I got to the new office, all new furniture and that prestigious postcode. So you want to know where your donations go,
When I got back I did some research of my own into what these senior management get paid. It was shocking.
Now move on 25 years, they don’t want a donation, they want you to have a subscription so they can carry topping up their bonuses.
I even went around with my mum when I was a young teenager collecting donations.
I now only donate to local charities with local interests at heart.
David Miliband wouldn’t get out of bed for 6 figures
The problem is CEO pay in the private sector has become completely divorced from actual performance or outcomes. It’s just a ridiculous number regardless of whether you do a decent job (see Thames Water executives).
The idea was that CEOs get the high salary because the buck stops with them. Fairly or not, if anything went wrong, they took responsibility and it was their career on the line if it didn’t. And much of that big salary number was tied to the fortune of the company (i.e. company stocks).
Now that link has completely been divorced and large company CEOs are paid 7 figures just by default so the charity sector struggles to compete.
What would you rather, a well ran charity paying a £200k CEO salary and managing to do £10m of good? Or a shit show with a £50k CEO salary doing £1m of good?
Who am I kidding, I know exactly what most of the population would go for…
More transparency is needed so the media platforms can report with less speculation.
Why would someone who is competent and qualified choose to be CEO of a major charity if the pay was going to be peanuts for such a role?
Charities report annually the percentage of their income that makes it directly to the cause they are supporting. When I was at Teenage Cancer Trust this was around 80p per £1 donated – and I still had people telling me that wasn’t good enough somehow.
In my 2 years there as a fundraiser I sourced over £350,000 of funding from some of the most deprived areas of the UK, and yet I would regularly get told I should be ashamed of myself for taking a wage from a charity – as if my children don’t deserve to eat or have a house
Expecting people on 5-figure salaries to club together and donate to pay 6-figure salaries was always a hard sell. Bosses pay is completely disconnected to employees and what the majority will ever have the opportunity to earn. The charity sector has to keep up with industry to keep the calibre. Some charities are wasteful/greedy and that tars the others. I find the Charity Commission website useful as they detail the number of people earning over £60K.
It’s wrong to say this level of pay is OK because of the CEO pay levels at other private companies. BOTH pay levels are too high. CEO pay is divorced from reality. This is why we end up with billionaires and a poor middle class.
“Six figures” sounds a lot but that’s only £100k which isn’t exactly loads of money for a CEO.
Elephant in the room for the big charities is how many of them are unnecessarily based in London.
It is not just the high salaries that appear to be a problem. Another issue is the amounts of money spent in fundraising. Money going into advertising and marketing and not into the aims of the charity itself. Still all this extra spending just generates more taxes for the government.