In November, I wrote two columns regarding the devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. In one of them, I recommended that readers donate to a charity they trust. I wanted to suggest a specific charity, but I couldn’t think of any that I considered trustworthy. CEOs of charities with the top 25 highest salaries can make between $773,693 and $2.2 million, according to CharityWatch.org, and that seemed to me like too much money for a true philanthropist to make. I was unable to find any charity that pledged to use 100 percent of its profits for relief efforts, and anything less than 100 percent wasn’t good enough for me. Hearing so many people speak in a disgusted tone about the huge salaries of charity CEOs and charity scandals made me not just skeptical, but almost cynical.  

During Winter Break, I watched a TED Talk that challenged my view of charity operations. Activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta asserted that “the way we think about charity is dead wrong.” 

Pallotta made an argument that I needed to hear, and I think people would rethink their views of charities if they listened to his talk.

“In the for-profit sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make,” Pallotta said. “But we don’t like nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service. We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. [It’s] interesting that we don’t have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people.”

I remember helping spread this idea in past years by digitally sharing charts that were made to incriminate charities by telling the salaries of their CEOs. I thought I was helping people save their money by telling them to donate directly to the cause rather than to these charity moguls. But the problem with this mindset is that we often don’t end up donating any money to anything. We excuse ourselves from all things charity related. What’s worse is that when we have this mentality, our reason for not donating is not that we don’t have the money. We think that by knowing the salaries of the CEOs, we somehow know better than everyone else because we know the back end of the operations. But Pallotta showed that most of us don’t understand it at all. 

When looking for a charity, it’s more important to look at what impact that charity has than how much money the CEO makes.  Sure, charities should tell us where our money goes, but we shouldn’t necessarily discredit the charity simply because it uses portions of the donations for advertisements. We hate when charities spend their money on anything other than the cause. But what if they spend the money on advertisements to generate more donations? So long as the amount of money used toward the cause exceeds the amount of money used toward advertisements, it is a good business practice.  

I have heard several people suggest that if charity CEOs really cared about others, they would only take a minimum wage salary from the donations and put the rest of the money toward the cause. But why should someone who is trying to help others out of poverty subsequently be forced into poverty? 

I’m not sure I’m convinced that CEOs of charities (or anyone, really) should be making a $2 million salary, but they deserve to make no less than CEOs of other companies.