Have you read any of the disclosure forms? They're a joke. I read the 990 for one organization (NLIHC [0]), a mostly-government-funded organization with >10M in "revenue". They're required to list their three most cost-intensive activities in field 4a of the 990, and brother, those people don't do a damn thing. They listed 1) they helped local governments spend tax money 2) made 8 pamphlets (the one I saw was ~10 pages long), and 3) they helped some other organization prepare some webinars. They list more fluff and nonsense (including attending conventions), but no meaningful deliverables. They couldn't even be bothered to proofread their one required deliverable, as evidenced by the bullet points which they copy/pasted into field 4a!
They employ 40 people and their CEO makes 400K, BTW.
These orgs do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I'm really not sure how to take the comment on the CEO's salary. Some days on HN, 400k is called one good software engineer's salary. Other day's its alluded to as being to as being an overpaid CEO. And then other days people try to justify CEOs making 100M a year.
It helps to understand why high CEO pay can be a good thing. It can be good because the difference between a 'meh' CEO and a fantastic CEO can be huge. If you really want to know why a Fortune 500 company's CEO might be worth 100M, just compare Ballmer's tenure to Nadella's!
Anyway, this isn't business. We're talking about an organization which employed 40 people, and whose own ordering of their deliverables by importance saw 'published 8 pamphlets' in their top 3. What, precisely, was the marginal benefit of paying the CEO 400K as opposed to say, 200K (which still amounts to ~5X the median personal income)? Did that 200K net an additional webinar production and another two pamphlets?
not mentioned in or at all related to TFA, but go off.
> mostly-government-funded
False. Just blatantly wrong. The 990 you linked reports zero revenue from government sources, (part 8, line 1e) and 21m from other grants and contributions (i.e. private sources). Regrettably their website's donors page is broken, but their most recent annual report[1] reports large contributions from exactly the large grant-making foundations you'd expect (Robert Wood Johnson, Hilton, Melville, Ballmer, Annie E. Casey, ...).
> 400k
354k, plus 44k in other benefits (i.e. health insurance etc.). Regardless, yes people working for nonprofits get paid. These are professional organizations. The people that fund these organizations want their contributions to be effectively utilized to pursue the mission of the nonprofit. Finding people who will accept the absolute minimum rarely leads to an effective, sustainable organization.
> deliverable
This is (primarily) an advocacy organization. Research, data, reports, analysis, consultancy, marketing material, etc. are their byproduct and collateral. Their goal is to cause impactful, beneficial programs to be funded, implemented, and have their effects realized by the needy populations their serve. The programs they've supported (e.g. National Housing Trust Fund) and their continued and growing support from private foundations should be evidence of success in their mission.
They employ 40 people and their CEO makes 400K, BTW.
These orgs do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
[0]https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521...