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Hi @wturvill. Here’s a thread for you in response to your published article in the Mail on Sunday about charity CEO salaries and overhead costs. I’d like to introduce you to @danpallotta. He did the most amazing @TEDTalks - here is the link ted.com/talks/dan_pall…
It’s all about why your article is undermining the amazing things the @ThirdSector is capable of. I’m sure you’re a busy man and won’t watch the video. So here is a summary of @danpallotta’s key points, which I really hope might alter the way you think about “overhead costs”
The way we have been taught to think about the causes we love are actually undermining the work they do. There are two rule books, 1 for the @thirdsector and 1 for the rest of the world.
For example, if you want to make £50mil by selling vinyl’s and video games – go for it, we’ll put you on the front of a magazine!!! But if you want to make £1/2mil by trying to cure kids of hunger – you’re considered a parasite.
Our sector cannot compete with the business sector. Why would a CEO of any for profit organisation take a huge pay cut to lead our cause? S/he may as well just become a donor and volunteer their time and expertise – they’d be better off.
People don’t want to see their donation spent on advertising. Even though advertising could recruit 100 event participants that will go on to raise triple the amount of money spent on advertising. But … at least your donation is going to the cause.
Charities can’t take risk – if Disney make a £200million film that flops, nobody bats an eyelid, but if a charity host an event that doesn’t hit budget, we are shamed, publicly, by articles like the one you wrote.
If we prohibit failure, we kill innovation. If we kill innovation in fundraising, we won’t raise more money. If we don’t raise more money, we won’t grow and if we don’t grow, we can’t solve large social problems.
A charity overhead is not a negative, especially if that overhead is for growth. Fundraising is an overhead, but it will help us grow, so that we can help more people and ultimately, enable us to multiply the amount of money we have to spend on the cause.
I don’t’ want my gravestone to read “I kept overhead costs low”. I want it to read that I helped to change the world, and part of the way I did that was by changing the way that you, @wturvill think about charity.
So the next time you’re looking at a charity, don’t ask what their overhead costs are. Ask them about the scale of their dreams, their @AppleSupport, @amazon and @Google dreams. How they will measure the progression of their dreams and what resources they need to achieve them.
Who cares what the overhead costs are if the problem gets solved? Who cares how much our CEO’s get paid if they’re curing cancer and changing the world? If we can change our thinking about charity, then we can play a huge part in changing the world.
P.S My favourite tweet about this (from @ToastFundraiser)
